Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. AI's use cases, whether it's sending way beyond the office. Pressy Taste AI, for example, a company bringing a power of artificial intelligence into the restaurant space, helping manage crews even predict demand. We're joined now by the CEO of that company in goos Stalk, as well as Union Square Hospitality Group founder Danny Matt,
an investor in Press Taste. Danny, I start with you because inlightened hospitality investments is where you've made this investment, but you've actually got a plethora of AI investments. How and at what point did you decide the artificial intelligence was going to change up your game of restaurant.
Here we're facing, as we always have in our industry, really a business model where we have pretty thin margins. In the restaurant industry is notoriously competitive. But I think what a lot of people may not realize is that by the time you're done paying your rent and the talent on the team, and the food costs and the insurance and the florists and all the expenses that only go up over.
Time, you're not lived with much.
And so we're constantly needing to find ways that we can become more productive, and machine learning, it turns out, is really really good at a number of things. It helps us to not only have much better data with which we can take much better care of our guests.
Buy the proper amount of food because we never want to run out of food, and on the other hand, we don't want too much food, have the right amount of labor and talent on the floor, never want to have too little, you never want to have too much. We don't necessarily have the ability to think about that and be very very present to offer great hospitality for
our guests. And so the more that we can find outstanding applications for machine learning AI, what it does is we get to be a lot smarter, but we also get to be better at hospitality.
Which is precisely where you want to be. Getting a sticking to that kitchen knitting. Meanwhile, Ango, you have been applying AI in the real world for a long time, whether it be in academia and we moved across to really wanted to change up the back of kitchen. What drew you there? And how quickly have you managed to scale?
Well?
We have I have been in machine learning. I did my pH in machine learning, when I still need to explain everyone what that is. But now I'm you know, since a couple of months, almost like just two years, where CHET, Chipte or Google AI other CHET agents came to market, it is now a big, big hype. Everyone you know has AI capabilities now in.
A chatbot, but the chetbot, you know, they have their limitations. You cannot have a drive your car, you cannot have it prepared your meal. You need specialized AI capabilities such as you know, using computer vision to identify what is going on machine learning predictions to that breaks down. Okay, what does this weather forecast and this POS forecast and this trade.
Area information mean for my kitchen right now in those fifteen million increments, so my crew can do and deliver the best to optimize those razor thin margins that exist in the restaurant AI.
For this specialized AI, that's what prec taste AI brings to the table. And it's basically also the missing puzzle piece why software couldn't come into the kitchens. Kitchens are often still run like in the fifties, and AI is the missing puzzle piece that can help to bring true help to those kitchen operations.
Danny, you've got some interesting puzzle pieces from investments. You've got seven shifts, seven rooms, precy Taste, AI Converse, now your amount who's often gone forward breaking boundaries when it comes to tipping culture, when it comes to talking to your own workplace, how they reacted to artificial intelligence with fair with excitement.
Oh, with excitement. Everybody who we hire is somebody who is a learn it all, not a know it all, and we're all looking for ways we can learn to be better. If you look at the different companies that you're showing right here, each one of these is providing the opportunity to make us better at the thing we were doing anyway. So there's nothing there that we were not doing before. It's just much quicker, much smarter, much more productive. And everybody likes it because once you learn it.
By the way, when you get a new toy, it's if I get a new update to my Apple phone, my iPhone, it takes me a day to get used to it, but once I get used to it, I.
Get exactly why they made those changes. So I don't want to say that the first day we put something in the practice, everybody goes so hallelujah. We have a new reservation syst we have a new scheduling system, we have a new way that we can talk to our guests, a new way we can get to know our guests, and in the case of Presi Tastes, a new way that we can actually deploy our talent to be as
productive as possible per task. That's the thing I want to be clear about Prezie Tastes, which is really cool, is that it knows all of our recipes. It knows exactly what we sold, what we're selling. It can actually see how busy our restaurant is, and it can give the kitchen in real time the predictions about how much food you should be preparing to replace what just got sold, how much food you should not be preparing, who should do it. And it's the kind of thing that managers
have done an okay job of year after year. But now those managers instead are taking their time to taste the food and make sure it's perfect before a sauce goes out, or they're taking the time to be with our guests.
So I appreciate having you both. Pressie Taco Ingo Stalk Union Square Hospitality Group Danny mar This is Bloomberg.
Yeah, I