Welcome to the future: A robot can now prepare your favorite Chipotle order. Just as long as you don't want a burrito, taco, or quesadilla. The robot cannot handle those. Your order must be a burrito bowl or a salad, and it must be placed online. Then and only then--and once the robot makes it out of testing at the Chipotle Cultivate Center, in Irvine, California--your queso-covered barbacoa bowl might soon be assembled by the chain's new "automated digital makeline." Announced on Tuesday, the result of a collaboration between Chipotle and the automation company Hyphen looks like a standard stainless-steel Chipotle counter, burrito components arrayed on top.

When you order a salad at Sweetgreen at some point in the future, it might roll off a conveyor belt after a robot kitchen puts it together. The company is buying Spyce, an automated kitchen startup. The deal is expected to close in the coming weeks. Sweetgreen is figuring out when and how to incorporate Spyce's tech at its more than 130 locations, but the overall goals are to improve food quality and consistency, and to make operations more efficient. All going well, Sweetgreen employees will spend more time on preparation and hospitality.

Accenture Chief Technology and Innovation Officer Paul Daugherty on how artificial intelligence will impact the workforce in America in the future. Artificial intelligence is devouring the restaurant industry. Delivery sales are projected to grow at more than three times the rate of revenue from customers dining in at restaurants, according to a report from L.E.K. consulting. And more than half of customers are ordering food directly from a restaurant's app or website, according to the same report. Here's how the restaurant industry is leveraging artificial intelligence to boost sales and reach more customers.

After raising $200 million in a Series H funding round last November, the culty salad chain Sweetgreen became the first-ever restaurant unicorn. Cold-pressed upstart Joe & the Juice is reportedly plotting a $1.5 billion IPO later this year. Now kale-scarfing, ginger-quaffing consumers have VCs salivating over salad. A new batch of food- focused investment firms like the Kitchen Fund and Enlightened Hospitality Investments (run by Shake Shack titan Danny Meyer) are pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into fast-casual startups--or, as they say, "early-stage scalable restaurant concepts"--powered by AI and data-mining apps. These food platforms incorporate technology as a base ingredient.