Conor McCarthy, co-founder of Irish unicorn Flipdish, says AI is not only transforming how its hospitality clients do business, but how its own business operates.
Dublin’s Flipdish offers independent restaurants an all-in-one platform for online ordering, point of sale, digital kiosks, websites, apps and marketing tools. Now artificial intelligence is transforming how the company and its clients do business.
The era of generative AI has opened up new and very tangible opportunities for efficiency and growth, says Flipdish co-founder Conor McCarthy. Moreover, he says it’s having a major impact on the company’s own operations, helping it streamline its processes and focus on the core business.
Founded in 2015 by McCarthy and his brother James, in 2022 Flipdish became one of those relatively rare beasts in Ireland, a so-called unicorn start-up, when it was valued at over $1.25bn after a funding round led by China’s Tencent.
It hasn’t all been plain sailing in the intervening years, with rapid growth in staff having to be reined in, and job cuts of some 40pc in 2024, which Flipdish said at the time resulted in a cut in losses of some 57pc.
Focus regained
McCarthy admits that Covid led to a lack of focus, as the company was pulled in too many directions trying to provide digital solutions for everything from hotels to international sports stadiums. He says the decision to focus back in on its core business has transformed its prospects.
“Pre-Covid we were very focused on deliveries and takeouts and that went extremely well for us,” says McCarthy. “Then during Covid lots of hospitality businesses were trying to digitalise and we got pulled in many different directions. We ended up working with hotels trying to get QR codes into their rooms, we had our kiosks in stadiums in the US, even train companies trying to digitalise their ordering – lots of very disparate businesses and we attempted to help all of them. That ended up stretching us a lot with different products for each customer.”
Post Covid the company refocused back on its ideal customers, says McCarthy, which is delivery and takeaway-led restaurants, principally in Ireland and the UK. That refocus has made the difference, says McCarthy, and it led Flipdish to acquire a POS (point of sale) company back in 2023, Jinoby.
London-based Jinoby’s POS product was then integrated into Flipdish’s own offering allowing the company to offer a true all-in-one product to its core clientele, says McCarthy.
“So a client restaurant can have their menu management in one place and push it out to all the different marketing channels, they have their Flipdish kiosk for ordering on site, their ordering apps and websites, and have all the orders come straight back into their POS system, plus a driver-tracking system for their own drivers. It offers them an easy life. I’m not aware of any other system like that in the UK or Ireland.”
It’s a strategy that has paid off he says, and today Flipdish is seeing steady revenue growth, and an increase in headcount back to around 300 people.
The AI factor
The other factor that is making a difference is AI, says McCarthy. It has changed how Flipdish operates itself, and the breadth of time-saving services it can offer its restaurant operators.
“So we would have quite a few people in Flipdish who have never written software before, but now are creating software by using tools like Cursor,” he says, citing the example of an office manager who was managing international flights for the team and having to work out if they were within company policy.
“That person is not a software engineer but went to Cursor, and said ‘here is the problem’ and managed to create a really useful piece of software and a website where the team can enter their flights and it works out whether it is within policy, based on distance, price, how far away in the future. That’s just an example of how its helping us automate workflows.”
And AI has really come into its own when it comes to the sales and support team, he says.
“The role of support is changing quite a lot. Our support managers used to only be focused on managing the people and the processes that those people followed. Today their jobs are shifting towards managing AI agents and giving the agents the right tools.”
These tools include being able to automatically triage support queries, ensuring they go to the right team, or automatically issuing refunds where appropriate. “That’s something you want to be seamless for the customer, and not be a decision the client has to make. It helps our support team offer a really good experience.”
McCarthy believes AI can be a game-changer for its customers too – busy hospitality operators who are more interested in their core business than spending hours on marketing and customer communications.
“For someone running a busy restaurant, cooking food and getting orders out of the door often comes first compared to things like building a website, creating specialised marketing material and keeping track of customer loyalty, says McCarthy, but he says AI can change all that.
From running promotions to managing menus, AI is automating huge amounts of that and tasks that once took a morning can now be completed in minutes, he says.
“Producing quality imagery used to require a well-lit kitchen, a decent camera and a good deal of patience,” says McCarthy. “Now, image-enhancement tools powered by AI can upscale low-resolution photos, adjust lighting, remove backgrounds or correct imperfections. Restaurant staff can touch up professional marketing visuals using nothing more than a smartphone.”
Call my agent
And McCarthy only sees AI continuing to have greater impact as people’s ordering habits change, particularly in the the advent of agentic AI.
“In the future, people will likely start ordering through the likes of ChatGPT or Claude, which will be able to handle the payment and know your address,” says McCarthy. “It’s already happening in retail and I don’t see why that wouldn’t extend to the hospitality industry and food ordering.”
This move toward agentic AI is of course likely to be a concern for the large food marketplaces like JustEat and Uber Eats, as it risks disintermediation for them.
“If people are just ordering through ChatGPT, then ChatGPT becomes the marketplace, and that sort of dissolves a lot of the value of these food ordering marketplaces,” says McCarthy. “For Flipdish, I believe it will actually help our business because we are connected right into the store. Our hardware and software is in the store and whether the order comes in online or through any channel it comes through Flipdish and then goes to the restaurant’s KDS [kitchen display system].
“So if people’s ordering habits start to shift to ordering through ChatGPT, that would come through our stack and then straight into the restaurant’s kitchen. I think it could be a big benefit to us when that shift happens.”
As for the future of Flipdish, McCarthy says it is all about onboarding clients at scale.
“We have what I call good problems, in that we’re all very focused at the moment on our ability to onboard customers at scale. We’ve a great product, our customers really like us – our challenge is the onboarding needed and, to that end, we’re looking at improving automation there too, to make it easier for clients to manage all of their Flipdish products themselves.”
Primarily focused on Ireland and the UK today, McCarthy says Flipdish has around 50pc of the takeaway market here, but it only has a 5pc market share in the UK. “So we’ve still a long way to go. I think the next 18 months will be about deepening our penetration in the UK, and that will all be about improving our client onboarding at scale.”
As digitisation soared due to the Covid effect, we saw many rapidly expanding start-ups crash and burn. Flipdish found a way to rein its operations back in to its core competency, and today McCarthy says he’s extremely happy with the direction of travel.
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