How AI Is Transforming Restaurants Now

How is AI delivering operational efficiencies and personalized guest experiences right now in the real world? During MURTEC 2024, Robert Dawson, a hospitality industry consultant and a trailblazer in business intelligence, e-commerce, and solutions architecture, explored use cases that demonstrate how AI is already transforming restaurants. Here are some key takeaways from his session.

• Everyone is worried that GenAI will take over their job. It’s true, GenAI will make some jobs irrelevant. But GenAI is just a powerful tool, the way computer coding or a web browser were powerful tools. It’s smart and can reason, but ultimately, it’s still just a tool.
• I told ChatGPT to act as an SEO expert and provide a list of keywords for a steak house located in downtown Chicago. Within seconds I had 20 highly optimized keywords. Were they all perfect? No. But I didn’t have to start from a blank piece of paper. Then I had it write two paragraphs of SEO optimized content based on two specific keywords it had generated. It gave me some great content to work with. Of course, you’ll have to tweak it. But you can ask it to rewrite the content with a more specific focus. For example, rewrite this to sound like a five-star restaurant. I used to charge a hefty retainer to do this type of work and ChatGPT was able to do in minutes what my team would take a couple weeks to deliver. 
• I asked ChatGPT to switch roles and answer my questions while acting as a director of marketing. Using the same example as above, I gave it a $40k budget and asked it to explain how I should use that money for digital advertising. It gave me two options to choose from that had two different goals. After choosing my preferred option, it provided me with a full table breakdown as well as an explanation for each line item. 
• You can now use AI to train employees around the world. There are now AI software solutions that will create an avatar that will read a script in multiple languages. So, you no longer have to hire actors to do this.
• Adobe now has AI built into the platform that allows you to create your own images. ChatGPT does too. This might help when it comes to lowering photography costs or simply helping a restaurant generate ideas for what they’d like a photographer to do for them. 
• Eighty percent of Google’s revenue comes from search. But Bing has just integrated ChatGPT into their search engine. Now organic searches on Bing are returning some amazing interactive content. This could change the way humans look for answers to their questions. It’s my opinion that the concept of search will go away and instead we’ll start asking AI for answers to our questions. So instead of saying: “Let me Google that.” we will say: “Let me ask that.”
• AI is now able to perform actions, not just return answers to questions. You can actually hire AI to be an administrator’s assistant that answers emails, phone calls, etc. It requires a lot of access to your private information, but the ability is there. 
• OpenAI recently did a devday where they demonstrated that ChatGPT can see, hear and talk.