From demos to tool-using agents
The research and product wave around tool use, function calling, and multi-step agents matters for shops because dinner rush is a workflow, not a chat. An agent that can take payment and open a kitchen ticket beats one that only sounds clever.
Reliability is the product
Papers and vendor blogs now stress evaluation, guardrails, and human handoff. That matches what London owners feel: one wrong allergen answer destroys trust. Algonix designs for constrained menus, explicit escalation, and manual fallbacks.
What to ignore
Prioritise automations that return hours or revenue in weeks. Free AI onboarding exists to prove that before you scale spend.
- Generic “AI employees” with no ops map
- Dashboards your staff will never open
- Projects that need a new customer app on day one
What we are watching next
Better voice agents on real phone lines, tighter WhatsApp commerce patterns in the UK, and accounting connectors that need less babysitting. We adopt what is stable enough for a Friday night service — not every launch blog.