AI Deployment for Hospitality, From an Operator Who Runs the Floor

A service audit starts at $3,500, fixed price, agreed before any work begins. Deployment and ongoing measurement are scoped and quoted after the audit, because the honest number depends on what the audit finds. If you move from an audit to a deployment, the audit fee is credited toward it. Most businesses should start with the audit regardless, because it tells you whether a deployment is worth buying at all.

No, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling. The work worth automating in a restaurant is the work nobody wanted: answering the same question forty times before service, reconciling inventory, drafting schedules, writing allergen sheets. The work that makes a room worth returning to is reading a table, and no model does that. In practice this gives managers back hours they were losing to admin, which is the opposite of replacing them.

Reliably: answer guest questions before service, hold an entire wine list without misquoting a price, synthesize guest history before a shift, draft review responses, reconcile inventory, generate SOP and allergen documentation, and prompt upsells that fit the table. Unreliably: anything that requires judgment about the person standing in front of you. Knowing where that line sits in your specific business is the whole job.

In your numbers, not a vendor's. Manager admin hours reclaimed, comp and error reduction, check average movement, covers protected during peak, and labour cost per reclaimed task. Every engagement produces a scorecard, and the monthly retainer exists to prove the tool is still earning. Most AI projects skip this step entirely, which is why most of them cannot tell you whether they worked.

Yes. Wineries, importers, and wine retail are core clients, not an adjacent category. I hold WSET and ISG Diplomas and have built wine programs at the highest level, so the domain knowledge is already there. Typical work: tasting notes and technical sheets that sound like the producer rather than a machine, allocation and customer matching, direct-to-consumer communication, and trade education material.