NCR Voyix Unveils AI-Powered Platform to Tackle Restaurant Industry's Core Crises

ATLANTA, GA – January 09, 2026

NCR Voyix Corporation is making a significant strategic move to modernize restaurant operations with the announcement of a next-generation suite of AI-driven, cloud-native applications. As the company prepares to showcase its restaurant technology strategy at the influential ICR Conference in Orlando on January 13, the unveiling marks a pivotal moment in its platform-first modernization effort. The new suite, built on the Voyix Commerce Platform, is engineered to directly confront the most pressing challenges crippling the hospitality sector today: persistent labor shortages, escalating operational costs, and the complex demands of the modern diner. Benny Tadele, the company's Executive Vice President and President of Restaurants, is slated to detail how these interconnected solutions aim to create smarter, more agile, and more resilient restaurant businesses.

A Strategic Response to Industry Headwinds

The restaurant industry is navigating a perfect storm of economic and operational pressures. NCR Voyix's latest technology initiative is not an innovation in a vacuum; it is a direct answer to these systemic problems. Recent industry data paints a stark picture: labor remains a top concern, with over half of all operators citing a shrinking talent pool as a primary challenge heading into 2026. This shortage, which has eased only slightly from its post-pandemic peak, continues to strain operations and drive up labor costs, which have seen an unprecedented climb since 2021.

Simultaneously, food and supply costs have surged, with over 90% of operators reporting increases and menu prices climbing more than 27% since 2019. This has put immense pressure on margins, forcing restaurants to do more with less. Amidst this cost crunch, guest expectations have become more sophisticated. The modern consumer demands a seamless experience across dine-in, takeout, and delivery channels. While on-premise dining is rebounding, the demand for off-premise options continues to grow, with two-thirds of consumers wanting more choices for takeout and delivery. This multichannel reality creates significant operational complexity, from managing disparate menus to ensuring a consistent brand experience. NCR Voyix's strategy is to provide a unified toolkit that addresses these pain points head-on, leveraging AI to enhance labor efficiency, streamline back-office tasks, and deliver the personalized, omnichannel experience that guests now expect.

Under the Hood: A Modern, Microservices Architecture

At the core of NCR Voyix's new offering is a fundamental shift in technological philosophy. Moving away from traditional, monolithic point-of-sale (POS) systems, the company has embraced a "platform-first" approach built on its Voyix Commerce Platform. This platform utilizes a microservices architecture, which breaks down large, complex applications into smaller, independent services that communicate with each other. For a restaurant operator, this technical shift translates into tangible business advantages: agility, resilience, and speed.

A key component enabling this agility is the Voyix Edge, an edge-native application engine. It effectively transforms in-store hardware into a flexible environment where new applications and updates can be deployed rapidly from a central cloud control plane. This "cloud-to-edge" design means mission-critical functions can continue to operate locally even if internet connectivity is lost, ensuring resilience and uptime. Furthermore, this architecture allows for faster innovation. Instead of waiting for massive, disruptive system-wide updates, restaurants can adopt new features—like advanced AI or robotics—incrementally and at scale. This decouples capabilities from the core POS, giving operators the flexibility to choose and implement the specific tools they need without overhauling their entire system, a critical factor for businesses looking to adapt quickly to changing market trends.

A Unified Suite for the Modern Restaurant

The Voyix Commerce Platform serves as the foundation for a new, cohesive suite of applications designed to manage every facet of the restaurant business. This integrated ecosystem replaces siloed, outdated tools with a single source of truth.

The new suite includes:
* Aloha Next by Voyix: This is the next evolution of the company's flagship POS solution. Reimagined on the new platform, it combines decades of feature development with the speed and flexibility of a cloud-native design. It enables centralized management across all locations, providing real-time insights while ensuring mission-critical resilience at the store level.
* Aloha Menu by Voyix: Addressing a major operational headache, this application provides a centralized interface for menu management. Using a "create once, deploy everywhere" model, operators can design a menu and push it simultaneously to the POS, mobile apps, online ordering sites, kiosks, and third-party delivery platforms. This ensures consistency, simplifies promotional rollouts, and allows for dynamic pricing adjustments across all channels from one place.
* Aloha Smart Manager by Voyix: This all-in-one back-office application is designed to save managers time and empower them with data. It consolidates labor management, inventory tracking, scheduling, and reporting into a single, intuitive mobile-accessible tool, allowing managers to step away from the desk and focus on the guest experience.
* Aloha Consumer Marketing by Voyix: In an era where data is king, this application unifies customer data, marketing efforts, and loyalty programs. It captures and connects disparate data points to build comprehensive guest profiles, enabling restaurants to understand customer behavior and deliver personalized offers that drive repeat business and revenue growth.
* Voyix Kitchen: This advanced kitchen display system (KDS) streamlines communication between the front and back of the house. It's designed to accelerate order fulfillment, improve accuracy, and, with its offline capabilities, ensure the kitchen keeps running smoothly even during network interruptions.

Together, these tools form a connected ecosystem that aims to eliminate operational friction, from the guest's first touchpoint to the final back-office report.

Navigating a Crowded and Competitive Market

NCR Voyix's ambitious software modernization is unfolding within a fiercely competitive and rapidly growing restaurant technology market. The global market, valued at over $5 billion in 2024, is projected to surge to nearly $20 billion by 2033. North America currently dominates this space, making it a critical battleground for market share. The company faces formidable competition from established players like Toast and Square, which hold significant portions of the market, as well as other major technology providers like Oracle and Lightspeed.

In this crowded field, differentiation is key. NCR Voyix is betting that its deep industry experience combined with a truly unified, microservices-based platform will provide a compelling advantage. While competitors offer integrated solutions, NCR Voyix's emphasis on a flexible, open platform and its "cloud-to-edge" infrastructure with Voyix Edge is a strategic differentiator aimed at providing superior resilience and agility.

Wall Street appears to be taking a favorable view of this strategic direction. The company currently holds a "Moderate Buy" consensus rating from analysts, with recent reports highlighting the software modernization strategy as a key driver for future growth. Stifel recently reiterated a "Buy" rating, citing the unveiling of the next-generation software suite as a positive catalyst. Analysts see the move toward a SaaS-based model and increased software and services revenue as a clear path to improved margins and long-term value, positioning NCR Voyix's platform play as a crucial move to secure and expand its leadership position in the digital age of dining. The upcoming presentation at the ICR Conference will be a key opportunity for the company to make its case directly to the investment community.