Skai Solutions is a New Zealand company making an AI phone agent for restaurants, cafes and takeaways in Australia and New Zealand. It answers the calls your team cannot get to, takes orders into your POS, and does it in an accent your customers actually have.
The market it is built for is small by the standards of the companies selling into it. Stats NZ counted 9,858 cafes and restaurants and 7,422 takeaway food services in New Zealand at February 2025, geographic units, rounded to base 3. That is the whole country. It is why almost every product in this category is designed somewhere else and adapted here, and why Skai Solutions was built the other way round.
Every hospitality venue has the same unmeasured leak. The phone rings hardest at exactly the moment nobody can answer it, and the calls that go unanswered never appear in any report, because a customer who couldn't get through simply bought dinner somewhere else.
Plenty of software promised to fix this. Most of it was built in North America, where the accents, the POS systems, the suburb names and the way people order are all different. It demos beautifully and then mishears an address on the first real call.
Skai Solutions was built here instead: tuned on New Zealand and Australian speech, connected to the POS systems venues in this part of the world actually run, and supported in a timezone where 7pm on a Saturday is 7pm on a Saturday.
You keep your number. Calls divert to Skai. You control the divert - during service only, after hours only, or always.
No lock-in. Month to month, 30 days' notice to cancel.
Live in five days. No new phone system, no new hardware, no tech team.
We'll tell you if it's not a fit. If your phone mostly carries supplier calls and enquiries rather than orders, a cheaper message-taking service will serve you better and we'd rather say so on the demo than sell you something that disappoints.
Start with the category, not with us. If you are still working out what this kind of product is and whether it suits your venue, read what an AI receptionist actually is first. It covers what the category costs in Australia and New Zealand, what it handles badly, and who should not buy one.
Three concrete things, not a slogan.
The speech. Suburb names, street names and Maori place names are where overseas voice products fail first, because they are trained on a different phonebook. A phone agent that cannot hold Papatoetoe, Woolloongabba or Whakatane is not going to survive a Friday.
The POS list. The systems venues here run are not the systems American vendors integrate with. Skai Solutions connects to eight, and the full list, with what each one does and does not sync, is on the POS integrations page. It is deliberately shorter than some lists you will see.
The rules. Wages, rosters and booking terms are national instruments in both countries and they are not the same on each side of the Tasman. That shows up in the writing on this site: the pages on hospitality award rates in Australia and on whether a restaurant can charge a no show fee are built off the award text and the regulator pages, not off a template.
One rule, and it is the reason this page exists. Every statistic on a page we write is either linked to a named publisher, or it is our own arithmetic with the inputs shown.
That rule came from checking the industry's most repeated number. The claim that 60% of callers hang up after 45 seconds on hold traces only to an unnamed, undated study cited by a company selling on hold audio. There is no title, no author and no link anywhere behind it. The best real evidence, a full year census of more than 1,200,000 calls published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 2005, measured about 20% abandonment and mean caller patience of 446 seconds. The folklore number was on our own homepage until 26 August 2026. We took it off.
The same applies to money. Figures circulating in this market about missed call revenue frequently trace back to the vendor that produced them, with no method published, and we do not repeat them. Where we use our own model, it is labelled as ours and the inputs are on the page so you can put your own numbers in.
For context we do use: the Restaurant Association of New Zealand's 2025 Hospitality Report puts wage costs at about 40% of hospitality revenue, and total industry sales at NZ$15.99 billion for the year to June 2025. Those are named, published and linked wherever we lean on them.
Skai connects to Kounta/Lightspeed, Square, Impos, H&L POS, Tevalis, Revel, TouchBistro and Oracle MICROS. That list is shorter than some competitors', and if you run a system that isn't on it, we'll say so rather than promise a roadmap date. It's the first question worth asking any vendor in this category.
We also don't publish industry statistics we can't source. Figures circulating in this market about missed-call revenue frequently trace back to the vendor that produced them, with no method published. When we quote a number on this site, it's either from an independent source we've linked, or it's clearly labelled as our own.
Skai Solutions is a New Zealand company and sells into New Zealand and Australia only. Support runs in a timezone where 7pm on a Saturday is 7pm on a Saturday.
Eight: Kounta and Lightspeed, Square, Impos, H&L POS, Tevalis, Revel, TouchBistro and Oracle MICROS. If your system is not on the list, Skai Solutions will still answer calls and take bookings, but an order reaches you as a message rather than a ticket in the POS.
Five days from sign up to live calls. You keep your existing number and divert calls to the agent, and the divert can be switched on during service only, after hours only, or all the time.
No. Month to month with 30 days' notice to cancel.
Every statistic on a page Skai Solutions writes is either linked to a named publisher such as Fair Work, the ABS, Stats NZ or the ACCC, or it is our own arithmetic with the inputs shown on the page. Widely repeated industry figures that trace back to a vendor with no published method are not used.
Questions: info@skaisolution.com. Or start with the guides, or what Skai Solutions costs.