When artificial intelligence startup OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in November, it was quickly regarded as a watershed moment for technology.
If you’ve used the software, you probably understand why. You can type a question into a box and ChatGPT will type back, almost instantly and with considerable nuance. You can ask it to write lines of computer code or a tweet in the style of @Wendys. It has been described as Google on steroids.
ChatGPT’s secret is essentially that it got a good education. It was trained on what’s known as a large language model, which involves ingesting a massive amount of content from books and articles and websites that has taught it how to understand speech patterns and generate cogent responses.
ChatGPT (which stands for “generative pre-trained transformer”) is not the first chat bot, and other companies, notably Google, are developing competitors. But by all accounts, it is the most advanced.
“The real innovation there is [the] large language models,” said Rajat Suri, CEO of Presto, a company that makes an AI-powered voice bot for drive-thrus. “They’re smarter than anything we’ve seen in the past.”
Can a chat bot really do much for restaurants? Companies like Presto think so. The possibilities include everything from responding to customer feedback to writing menu descriptions to powering AI waitstaff.
ChatGPT can respond in a variety of modes and voices.
Some of these functions are possible today, while others could take much longer to develop. And it should be noted that the industry has only just begun exploring this technology. In fact, no one I spoke to for this story was aware of a restaurant that is actually using it.
And yet it has attracted plenty of attention. A session on ChatGPT at the International Franchise Association convention in February drew a standing-room-only crowd. Earlier this month, Credit Suisse published a 200-page report on ChatGPT’s business potential. While the buzz around the bot echoes that of erstwhile tech trends like NFTs and the metaverse, this is not that, said Lauren Silberman, restaurant analyst for Credit Suisse. ChatGPT could actually be quite useful for restaurants, quite soon.
“I can see the applicability of ChatGPT in the context of AI,” she said. “NFTs … didn’t do too much. In our space or elsewhere.”
Indeed, artificial intelligence has become the technology of the moment for restaurants. They’re using it to do things like answer the phone and predict how much product to order as they battle rising costs. ChatGPT could become a key piece of this movement, in part because it has gone mainstream so quickly. With more than 100 million users between November and January, it’s reportedly the fastest-growing app of all time.
“With people being able to use it in their daily lives … I think you can speed up adoption at restaurants,” Silberman said.
According to Silberman, the best near-term restaurant use case for ChatGPT is customer service. Chains could integrate the bot with their website or social media accounts to respond to questions or feedback, a time-consuming task that is virtually impossible for human employees to keep up with.
“The challenge for these companies is to actually engage with customers and provide personalized feedback and do it in a speedy fashion,” Silberman said. “I think [ChatGPT] really accelerates this process.”
Would a ticked-off customer care that their complaint is being handled by a robot and not a human?
“I don’t think they would know, and quite frankly at this point, I think everyone’s accepting of it,” she said. “I think everyone wants to be engaged with.”
The next logical step after fielding customers’ feedback might be actually taking their orders. Presto is in the process of integrating with ChatGPT to make its voice bot more human-like.
“Adding this to our technology really helps us to improve how natural it sounds and how seamless voice AI at the drive-thru can act,” Suri said.
That will require training ChatGPT on a restaurant’s menu, a process that takes a week or two, according to Suri. He said the integration will be available soon to Presto customers, which include Checkers & Rally’s and Del Taco.
And he believes ChatGPT can help take voice bots beyond the squawk box.
“We actually think cashiers in the restaurants are going to become virtual in the future,” he said. “You’re going to have a virtual AI take your order in the restaurant versus a human.”
He thinks that could happen as soon as this year.
Other companies are developing ChatGPT applications for the back-of-house. ClearCOGS, a startup that helps restaurants forecast demand by analyzing past data, is working with ChatGPT to help automate the process.
“When GPT came out, it really moved our road map ahead by like 18 months,” said CEO Matt Wampler.
The former Jimmy John’s franchisee shows me an example of how this might work. He opens what looks like a messaging app and types in a question from a hypothetical restaurateur: How did yesterday go?
It takes the bot only a few seconds to respond. “3/14/2023 was a good day,” it writes. Then it breaks down the numbers: sales, labor costs, drive-thru time. It also flags a couple of issues: There were no sales in the last 23 minutes of service, and two deliveries took over an hour.
It’s convenient, if not revolutionary. After all, this is data operators already have access to, albeit in a less digestible format, Wampler said.
It’s also not as simple as it looks. To make this possible, ClearCOGS has to anticipate what questions restaurants will ask and then give ChatGPT the data it needs to answer correctly. Otherwise, the bot might respond with inaccurate information, which OpenAI refers to as “hallucinating.”
“It likes to come up with things,” Wampler said. The question is, “How do you cut the generative piece out?”
To help solve that problem, ClearCOGS asked restaurant executives to submit questions so it could get an idea of what people might ask. It was expecting queries about hard data—things like comps, sales, drive-thru times. But that’s not exactly what happened.
“We were kind of surprised to see these open-ended questions on, like, ‘What’s the best way to set up my Metro racks in my fridge?’” Wampler said. It was something of an aha moment.
“The power of this technology isn’t the fact that it can answer questions,” he said. “It’s the fact that for the first time ever, there’s a tool that’s actually useful that captures the intent of what people are trying to do.”
That’s what excites Wampler most about ChatGPT. He believes it could become the basis of a kind of restaurant business internet, a clearinghouse for brand-specific questions and answers.
The bot has limitations, especially when it comes to factual information.
“When you go around and talk to franchisees in the same franchise, every one of them has these little gems [of knowledge],” he said. ChatGPT could be used to collect and store that information for others to access.
Not only would it act as an automated help line for managers, but it would also help corporate keep tabs on restaurants. It can take weeks for field-level problems to come to the attention of headquarters, Wampler said, but ChatGPT could surface issues immediately and allow the brand to take action.
“When you launch a new LTO, you know you’re gonna have 20 different questions,” he said. “You’re learning that, ‘Hey, we’ve got 20 questions on this today, and we don’t have an answer for you.’ … You want to have answers ready.”
The challenge, once again, is populating ChatGPT with those answers. Wampler suggested that a brand might start by loading the system with its existing training manuals and FAQs. But that’s far from the comprehensive, everyday tool he’s envisioning. “That’s where it gets tricky,” he said.
Like Wampler, Darien Bates is more interested in ChatGPT’s long-term potential than its near-term uses.
Bates is the former CTO of &pizza and current CEO of data company Fourtop Solutions. He recently organized a discussion group, the Restaurant AI Assembly, to study how the industry can best use the technology.
He believes ChatGPT can be helpful for restaurants down the road. He’s intrigued, for instance, by the idea of using it to help create training materials for staff. But that would require it to follow a set of brand-specific rules that take time and expertise to put in place.
“The technology is so far off in terms of its ability to both connect at the human level while also being compliant,” Bates said. “You can’t possibly put your compliance at risk by using this kind of tool.”
He does see more immediate uses at the corporate level, as a sort of virtual assistant that can help with ideation. He compared it to the PowerPoint feature that suggests different designs for a slide. ChatGPT could do something similar, but with forecasting models instead of PowerPoint layouts.
“At the leadership level, there’s an opportunity to kind of invent and create and discover collaboratively with an AI as a support,” Bates said. “There’s no ego and there’s nobody who’s just fed up with you asking for things.”
But he shares the concerns of others about the difficulties of training ChatGPT to work in restaurants.
“It has been developed on kind of a Wild West of data,” he said, which means it’s not always reliable. Turning it into a trustworthy business tool will take time. “There’s a real risk more generally with GPT,” Bates said, “but it’s less about restaurants.”