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Deep Learning with PolyAI
PolyAI's CEO/co-founder Nikola Mrkšić and team invite guests to candidly discuss trends and tech in AI, voice throughout the enterprise, and nailing the customer experience.
Deep Learning with PolyAI
The History of Restaurant CX: From Maître d' to AI
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In this episode of Deep Learning with PolyAI, Nikola Mrkšić sits down with Steven Fine, GM of Restaurants at PolyAI, to explore how technology has shaped the customer experience in restaurants over the past century.
From the first phone reservations to online booking platforms and now AI-powered voice agents, the conversation traces how hospitality has continuously adapted to meet changing customer expectations.
Nikola and Steven discuss why the phone is still one of the most important touchpoints in the restaurant journey, how missed calls translate into lost revenue, and how AI is helping restaurants capture demand while improving both staff and guest experience. Along the way, they explore no-shows, loyalty programs, large party bookings, and why voice AI is becoming a new revenue engine for the hospitality industry.
When you look at human behavior, we've always like the phone is especially on bookings that you want kind of immediately. It's always the channel that people turn to. They still turn to this day to pick up the phone to make a booking to check if they can get it in the next 45 minutes. So like very, very high intent bookers often book like immediately on the phone. Okay, so it's a higher intent channel. You're much more likely to show up. 100%. And I think actually we work with Open Table because it's high intent people, right? When you're calling, you're like, this is my decision.
SPEAKER_01Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Deep Learning with Polyai, our podcast for CX leaders looking to use AI to improve customer experience. And for everyone else interested in the world of AI, voice AI, and what you know the future world looks like. Before we start, please like, share, subscribe. Today with me, I've got Steven Fine, who is our GM of restaurants. He is the main person looking after our hospitality vertical, which was our first. And it's fast growing today. We're here as part of a week where we launch Polly I host, which is our kind of like one-click solution for restaurants, and we'll talk about all that. But Steve's good to have you here. Yeah, good to be you. Yeah. So I think, you know, everyone knows I'm a history buff. So before we go into the company propaganda and just the shape of the market, when did the first restaurant take a phone reservation?
SPEAKER_0018 1786? 1886? Yeah. 1886? I don't know. We were we were looking at this. We were looking this up on Chat GPT and it was way longer than I've definitely ever been alive. I mean, that was well before me. And I think, I mean, the world's come a long way since the first phone call.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. I think when I saw the year, I think it was 1876. I was like, whoa, two years before the Berlin Congress. That's a long time ago. And uh apparently by the 1890s, it was common in London, New York to see kind of like newspaper ads saying, you know, like phone in to pre-order, phone in to make a reservation.
SPEAKER_00Why do restaurants take reservations? I think there's like this consistency that they want of customers coming in. Like you've with all marketing, you always want to find a way to customers to actually get to you. And without them needing to walk in pre-the-phone, this was the easiest way to actually say, hey customers, we can we can book your space for you. You can come in at the time that works for you. And for them, that's like a major revenue driver. So it just kind of starts making sense as a way to get customers to you. Yeah. So on the one hand, they lock in revenue, right?
SPEAKER_01I g I guess what's always been interesting, especially when we say London, New York, was the feeling of exclusivity and like the the difficulty of getting a reservation for lucky places.
SPEAKER_00You can always also almost imagine at the beginning is if you had a phone, you were probably a little bit exclusive. I remember re like actually reading this book when it was talking about people where they've got their first phones in the car. You can just imagine a chauffeur calling, calling through. Do you remember your family's first mobile phone? I don't. I remember my first phone though. I remember my first Sony, a little Sony Ericsson. I actually it was first one was a tiny little Sony Ericsson. All we did on it was play Snake. And I got booked Snake on Sony Ericsson.
SPEAKER_01I remember the Snake on the legendary Nokia 33K. You know the one I mean. Yeah, of course Rick. Yeah, yeah. We have one in the office. We tried to turn it on and it was on. It had charge from like whatever decade that we we founded before. Yeah, that's amazing. I remember my dad getting his first mobile phone and he was, you know, kind of relatively high up in Yugoslav State Company. That was a big deal. And I inherited that phone like many years later, and I still have it somewhere. So it was a big deal. But okay, like the exclusivity absolutely matters, right? And I think that with the other side of the of the coin is it's actually quite hard to take reservations, right? Because no shows are really bad for a restaurant.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So I think it's always this like dilemma you have is you want, and you see this, I'll I'll relate it to the current world challenge that they have today, is you want to get as many bookings as possible, make that as easy as possible. But the easier you make something, the more likely someone ends up booking and not actually coming. And one of the big discussions I had with partners at Open Table was the reservation on Google, that click to reserve straight from Google, those have there's literally zero friction to getting a reservation at a restaurant. But with that lack of friction, it meant that they had higher no-show rates than any other channel that they'd seen before. So they actually pulled that off for a while because it was actually more hurtful to restaurants because they were stopped people walking in when real customers were making bookings, they actually couldn't get a space, which is a huge loss. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, no, no. I mean it's a huge deal. I know that even for the NHS, I remember leadership debate between Rishi Sunak and Liz Trust, where Rishi, who I think most would agree, is more technically competent, tried to really impress upon her and the audience how important no shows were to substantially improving the capacity of the NHS. And I think it fell on deaf ears because people don't really understand just the downstream effects of turning people away and then the restaurant's empty, then people think something's wrong, they don't book. When we look at like back to the history, right? We went from the phone and then like the internet happened. Yeah. So one did the first online reservation.
SPEAKER_00So Open Table were the pioneers on this. So I think there was a couple people before this, but when They're the ones that made it. They're the ones that made this a reality. So Open Table started 1998 when they launched that. And then obviously, like there's the progression of more and more people getting online. Yeah. And as more people go online, there's more places to then make a reservation. Right? Restaurants start having their websites. So and with that, you start going, oh, well, this is an unbelievable way for to get people where they are. So when people are searching the web, whatever they're doing, you've now made it so easy with Open Table and later other providers to actually just make a booking directly into your restaurant. With the same challenge of friction, though, you also do end up with no shows. And this is a slight side side thing, but one of the things we always saw with the phone is people often call to cancel reservations. And I mean, I know personally I feel really bad if I'm not going to make it, and I just quickly hop on the phone, cancel. Often those don't get answered, and that is then a no-show. All right. So even a cancellation is better than a no-show as 100%. Because cancellations you can fill. Yeah. No shows either with one pins or with others. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And then I think that that whole move to online was like amazing for the industry. It started creating a lot more structure in their table management as well. Because you start pulling from online and you pull that into a system that then people, your staff can track. Yeah, yeah. It'd be much more efficient. You can move tables around easier instead of this like paper note on the way down. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01We'll talk about that in the public occupancy management because I think that's been really fascinating. But I remember when we started the company, our first enterprise client, client to this day for five years now, company called Whitbread, the largest FTSE100 hospitality company. And we started working with them in their beefeeder pubs. And those are really iconic for Poly AI. They're like, you know, been there a lot. We have the logo hanging in our office. But what I found really interesting is just, well, two stats. One is that for London and New York, which you think of probably like the most like urban, fine dining, and dining and like populous metropolis, right? You think of online reservations and you would think they would completely take over. And the split is still 50-50. Like it just it reached that level and never really turned to fully online. Despite it being objectively, if you want to do it in the shortest amount of time, it's probably easier to do it online if you have a phone in your hand. Why is that?
SPEAKER_00Well, I think Chicago would challenge you on a third metropolis.
SPEAKER_01We all see the bear, which we've all seen the bear, great show.
SPEAKER_00I think that like when you look at human behavior, we've always like the phone is especially on bookings that you want kind of immediately. It's always the channel that people turn to. They still turn to this day to pick up the phone to make a booking to check if they can get it in the next 45 minutes, in the next hour. So like very, very high intent bookers often book like immediately on the phone. Okay, so it's a higher intent channel. They're much more likely to show up. 100%. And I think actually we worked with Open Table. There was amazing data to show that the phone no shows were about 25% lower than people who were booking online. Because it's high intent people, right? When you're calling, you're you're like, this is my decision. Yep. When you're doing it over online, I mean I know I've booked like three places at the same time, just going, I'll let people know which one I want to cancel, which one we want to go to on the nights. I mean, I guess I'm the the worst person for four of us. Definitely. I don't do it anymore because now I now I know how their lives look work.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you've seen inside the machine. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. So wait, then kind of like when you look at the whole industry, like where did it go from there? Like what happens with these different systems running in restaurants and like why is it valuable to have like an open table and or or or one of their competitors?
SPEAKER_00So if we go back to like all the systems that restaurants brought in. So I mean, historically, if you go back, they would have had you know next to nothing. I remember this the the story of a group that a tech company in in the in the UK who brought in like a POS system. And it was literally them in a pub in POS point of sale. And they it was a guy at who went into he ran a pub and he said, This is just obscene that I'm writing every single thing down on piece of uh piece of paper. Then the pricing changed and he needed to distribute that information to all of his team. He's like, Can't we just like put this behind like literally a calculator and it pulls it, pulls it in? And that was then like the foundation of the POS. It was literally, I remember the story he has he has like little stickers on numbers that each sticker represents something behind that. So it represents something in inventory, represents the pricing. And when they clicked, they clicked you know a pint of Guinness that pulled through to say, okay, here's the pints of Guinness, this is all and like all this stuff historically with tech is it's to make everyone's life easier, right? So it's less manual work, it's more reliable, it gives you better data on your customers so that you can use that in the past. And then I think like you that is like a foundational part to it. Then you move to like open tables, and that is now it gives you data on exactly when customers are booking, how far in advance they're booking, how many people they're booking for, and that allows you to actually realign your table settings to increase occupancy. So I think there's like all these massive benefits that everyone's gotten from technology, and I mean it's always the point of technology. Yeah. Make people's life more efficient and make businesses more to manage.
SPEAKER_01The occupancy stats are really interesting, right? Because when you've created what you need to facilitate these reservations automatically, you also create that like ledger of what's available, right? And then you're basically filling up inventory. I think the one that I like the most was we noticed that a lot of the restaurant table configurations, well, like we look at when when we say no, right? Kind of because it's interesting, right? And it turned out that large groups calling an hour before they were going to show up on Saturday night, mostly Friday, Saturday night, mostly groups of men looking for the next place to have drinks. And they were being turned away from restaurants which had enough capacity, but just not the right table setup. And I think digging through it after many, many months, I think we realized that the restaurant managers don't love these groups because they're loud, they're noisy. And then, you know, the decision is really at the top level do you want to be the kind of place that we'll have, you know, 12 loud men, you know, getting lying around each? The answer is for the most part, yes, if it's a liquor line, but these are the money, well, I mean the high margin groups, right? But I just thought it was really fascinating in that this channel could tell you that this is happening downstream, right? Exactly.
SPEAKER_00And I actually it's not the only time. I mean, we did it with the with Witbread, we did that, and we opta helped optimize their seating through the X demand. We've actually seen, especially as you move from single site groups where then the owner manager is literally there, they can really assess everything. It's a lot easier. Yeah. But with a lot of the multi-site groups that we've worked with is we present where customers are being told no at times. And we've actually had, because it's hard to manage across so many sites, we've had them actually go into their table management system, look at where the times that we've been saying no, and then literally re-optimize their whole seating within their TMS. And ultimately, like re-optimization is a way to drive more covers, a way to drive more seats. And it's always hard because I've always like I think about this often when it comes to the phone channel, is no other channel do you get to see when there's no, when a customer tries to book but doesn't, there's no availability. So if someone goes online and there's no availability, they just don't click that time. That's right. They're only ever going to click times that are available. Whereas on the phone channel, they're asking for a time. Yep, yep. They're being presented that no, you can't book at that time. Here's the closest one, and then booking the closest one. So now you actually have data on what people are trying to do, which previously used to be like a total black box. Yeah, yeah. Like total black box.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. No, it's really fascinating. I mean, I think that the other stud that I'm remembering as we speak is uncannily, across many different restaurant groups in in America, in in Europe, the missed calls rate tends to be around 30%. Sometimes a bit up, sometimes a bit down, but like 30 seems to be like uh the golden rule. And if you just think of like would people show up and the theory, you know, we talk about ROI and software, like whether Gen AI pilots are converting or not, and why not, and why yes in this case. And you can make up any number. If you were genuinely recuperating 30% of the business, that would be like unbelievable ROI, right? And we know it's not that because some people go online, some people walk in, but you never know how many. And I think the most precise kind of like calculation for this came from Fogo the Chow, one of our clients, they recently had our kickoff. Do you want to maybe give us a bit about that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I think first Fogo were the most data robust client I think we've ever worked with. I remember when we started the journey with Fogo the Chow, they came to us with a business case breaking down everything that was happening. So it is 25% of calls were missed, 25 to 30 percent, it was 500,000 calls a year, which is insane. And they knew that with each each reservation is worth about$200, right? And what they came to us with that challenge was like, we can't do this. And it's it's not just about their in-hours calls that people are missing, because you miss calls when the staff are busy at your peak times. Yeah, okay. A huge portion of this is after hours. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So no one's there to answer the phone, right? And it's it's never going to be a problem you solve with human capacity. Yeah. So what they came that exact issue. And after implementing it, we ran a pilot with them to actually see the impact of this. It was supposed to be three months and only with, I think, three sites, three to five sites. And what they ended up doing after a month is cutting it. They were like, no, cutting it in a good way. Saying, look, we can let's let's do this and scale it to 86. They had, and they've got private equity backers, so data is everything to them. Yep, yep. Is they saw 7.2 million uplift in incremental revenue. Right. That's about$7,000 per site that they have. So I mean, if you could add$7,000 to per month. Per month, sorry,$7,000 to every site every month. Yeah. Like why would you not? Why would you not do that? It's like the most obvious ROI that I've seen, and it's why I was desperate to take on restaurants as a division.
SPEAKER_01Of course. Yeah, yeah. No, no, totally. And I think that like when you look at those examples, it's especially for an enterprise group at that scale with expensive covers, it's a real moneymaker, right? Because I think like half of that is profit. Exactly. So it really like f flows into the bottom line in a spectacular way.
SPEAKER_00But I think what's important is obviously that's we we're talking enterprise here. And it's why I bring it down to per site level, is because we also serve individual locations. Oh, totally.
SPEAKER_01I mean, I think the point is that like an enterprise sometimes, in focus case, spectacularly they're really good at capturing the data, so we know. But you know, we I think we're deployed at well over a thousand different sites around the world before we started working with them. And only when we had their the the data were we able to actually put some numbers behind it in a way that we trusted, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So I think I mean we I work we I did some work with a little individual location in Sarasota recently, and we worked out on on their data that we were booking fifteen thousand dollars in reservations every single every single month. I mean, he was blown away because prior to this, you don't really know how much money's coming through the phone. You kind of guess, you're like, yeah, I think I get a lot of reservations. I mean, man, like you meant I mentioned you mentioned Chicago.
SPEAKER_01Have you seen the bear? Yes, yeah, I mean, like, you know, I think that like most startup people can actually gave me a lot of anxiety. That's no, no, no, no, no. I think that like a lot of startups, yeah. I'm like getting animated here. Like a lot of startup people can really identify with that show because every day is kind of like that. But uh, they're just fighting for like bear no, no pun intended, bear survival. Yeah, it's really hard business. So to think that they're like sitting behind there and like quantifying it all is insane. But also, like it's an example, you know, it's one of our top two verticals, the other one being healthcare. Both have examples of these jobs that involve picking up the phone to service demand, but they're not primarily a job description, right? It's not a contact center dealing with it. It's actually almost more a sales job than it is a service job, but it's one of your jobs. And it suffers at peak when you can actually do the most damage, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. No, I mean I it's I always think of this like distributed sites. Yes. Right? Like it never makes it like very hard to justify having a contact center. And we actually do have some customers who set up contact centers to solve this exact issue. And I always think like that's there's this idea. I remember reading a product book ages ago of like there's always an existing alternative to solve a problem. Like there's not only one way to solve a problem. And we saw like quite a few like large groups tried to solve this problem with contact centers. And they did, to for the most part, of in hours. They solved the in-hours challenge, but it's excessively expensive to solve this with in hours, and then you've still got all the after hours times that you can't answer.
SPEAKER_01And it's super peak times, you'll still get because like the microcosm of say 80 sites at scale during lunchtime or dinner time when they get the most calls, like sure, they're only picking up phone calls, but the spikes are such that you need a very atypically shaped contact center with staffing to service the full capacity. So even if they centralize it, they still miss a lot of the calls during peak time. Exactly. It doesn't even solve the problem.
SPEAKER_00And then they're sitting there doing nothing for most of the day. And and the I mean, this like the whole thing to me is like it's high intent customers booking for the same, like very often the same day or tomorrow. Right? High intent, it's when they're shopping around. So they are the people that you know when they book, they are going to come. And you also know that if they don't get through to you, they're looking to book somewhere. Huge, you see this huge at some of our clients who are largely like corporate dining, is their PAs often call. They have and what you often see is that they are shopping around. They're like, I'm just gonna find the place that I can book that will pick up. Yeah. That will pick up. And they and they calling in because they want to they want to add notes to it, they want to make sure it all works. And that's where I think there's just this huge opportunity that was not available to restaurants before. And I think it's like a good way to think about like it some of this tech started only being able to be available to the enterprise. Yep, yep. You do long deployments, you have like intense professional services behind it. But as you start, we've done this enough, you start going, well, we can actually build this at scale for individual locations for smaller sites and give them the same power that once was only available to the enterprise, now becomes available to the code.
SPEAKER_01I mean, I remember our first deployments, you know, these were like multi month builds, testing, rollouts, tuning, like different restaurant groups had different behaviors, different backends. It was still quite complicated. So what changed?
SPEAKER_00So I think there's a few things around like the integrations that you have. Ultimately, integrations are what drive task. Completion, right? To make a reservation, you need to be integrated into an open table. To make a large party booking, you need to be integrated into a triple seat. You have to be integrated into these systems to complete the tasks. So when we've now that we build out we've built out the core integrations that we know most restaurants use, it means that you can just reuse those very quickly and in an agentic way make sure it's tailored to each of those restaurants. So the integration portion is basically taken down to zero. And I mean this is I mean, we are we launch polyai host, which is takes under five minutes to get an agent set up with your knowledge base, knows about your restaurant, and is connected to OpenTable.
SPEAKER_01So just to kind of like re reconfirm, so Polyai Host is a solution for open table users where they go into their partners tab, so click a button, and what three minutes later, Energentic workflow has taken all their information from their website, from their open table instance, and created their preservationist rate.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, like I probably shouldn't, I'm not gonna swear on the on the podcast because go ahead. But like this shit is amazing. It is it is like unbelievably powerful to be able to sit on a call with a a restaurant owner, go through, and we don't even need to be there, but we do as part of our sales, sales call. They get they we sit there, they go through a three-minute flow that pulls all their information and connects to their open table and they are ready to start taking calls. It makes something that feels scary, that was the scary lift to be incredibly easy so they can get these results that used to only be available to enterprise. Right. So imagine the capability to in 10 minutes start adding$7,000 to your business a month. It's incredible, right?
SPEAKER_01It's it's like real ROI. And it just works, right? I think the beauty is like, you know, when you say enterprise really in the in a world that is still true for complex workflows and come, you know, custom integrations, it is still this world of deployment strategists and forward-deployed engineers. There's still like this CapEx investment and effort on both sides, including the customers' IT teams, to build an application that works for them. But this is almost like a SaaS-like promise. So like click, here you go, right?
SPEAKER_00Exactly. And I look, I we I mean, we serve both markets. Yeah. The enterprise needs that extra like love and care and help, right? The reason for that is just because when you're looking at 20 sites, there's a lot of complexity and push pushing that onto someone who's frankly never built out these systems before. It takes time. But when you've built up a more templatized solution that is templatized in terms of integrations, but not templatized in not giving personalization to that restaurant. Yep, like we just want to get this in the hands of everyone that that can do this. We have big plans this year for this. Yeah. It's how do you think it will go? I mean, based on what we've seen, like last year we we were we saw about a 10x increase in in phone calls through our systems, which is incredibly I mean amazing. It gives us more data, it allows us to better like train our models. And with that, I'd expect, I mean, I want it I want to do 20x. Yep. And we like this is that moment where we we've made it so easy for customers. We're offering them to get on for free at the moment. So customers, open table customers can come on for free and sign up. Yep. And that's our whole point is we want to put this power in the hands of every single restaurant owner.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. No, it makes sense. And I look, I think it's it's a far cry from where the tech used to be. And now with it, it's just everyone should have it because those that don't will be missing the calls from those PAs that are trying to make that that reservation, right?
SPEAKER_00When you think of this whole kind of like workflow, what's next? So with this is then we we start looking at, well, what do you tag on to that foundation, right? If open table and your TMS is your foundation, then you start tagging on everything that drives revenue, right? So you've got large party bookings, huge revenue driver for businesses. Yep, yep. And what you're seeing in an industry where margins are often tight, that's an extra like few covers makes a big difference to them. Large parties are starting to account for 20 to 30 percent of restaurants' revenue. Really? Yeah. Like it is a is this only like big metro areas or like in general or largely focused on metro areas, but you're seeing as you move these like corporate events, stuff like that, where people really kind of like as well, right? Exactly. Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. Like, I mean, I've we've gone to company events. You spend that's uh we spent more money. Absolutely, absolutely. Spend more on a company event.
SPEAKER_01There is a client who I can probably name V Landries. Yeah. I'm confident that across different laundry side, the events we've hosted, that we pay Landries more than they pay us. And we're talking about series six figure months both ways.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like then your your next thing is you're okay. Well, now I'm going to I'm going to do large, large party bookings. And you're integrated, leads are captured, and it goes through a CRM. Now you're okay. Well, now I've taken like a significant amount of work, but also I'm capped making sure no revenue call gets missed. And then your last, your last kind of lever to that is food ordering. When you start going into food ordering, that's like collection is the bigger thing. I think like on the whole, Uber, Uber, Delivery, DoorDash, all of those, like that is the mechanism that most people are ordering through. But there is a still a huge portion of collections. And curbside is huge. Yeah. Curbside pickup is huge. And that's like the full breadth of where restaurants capture revenue, right? Especially over the phone. And as you tick off each of those, like you live in this world of promise where you a restaurant never misses a revenue call again. Yep. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I think the other one that I found really interesting was with one of our clients, we ran these like Mother's Day, Father's Day campaigns where I think once you made a reservation for I think two weeks before, it will go like, have you booked for Mother's Day? And most people go, No, well, would you like to? Because if you come in between, I think it was between 2 and 6 p.m., we'll give you a round of drinks for free. Now, the reason that is done is that they staff up and they're like full to the brim, even if they don't run this campaign for lunchtime and dinner. It's like one of the these are like the heaviest days outside of like the Christmas period. Yeah. But I think it was what, like between two and six, they end up empty. Yeah. So this like round of drinks is basically very little extra cack for getting like a whole party in, and it drives, I think what it was like a Do you remember?
SPEAKER_00There's like a five percent uplift on revenue on the day. Hmm. Okay. And I think I I mean there's a there's a part to this like upselling and upselling motion is with if you have people in a in an industry where attraction is very high, I mean, if you go to one one front of desk that's there is probably not going to be there in six months' time. Like they these people move on. This very early like it's a you know university, college job. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is you don't get consistency, right? And what the promise that you know you can make with AI is it's going to be consistent on the upsells that drive the behaviors that you want. So a really nice example with a customer is loyalty is a huge thing for their business. They drive a significant amount of business through loyalty loyalty program. And what we're we're able to do is we have like agent memory where we remember customers who've called in and we offer them to sign up for the rewards program. Right. And we know that 40% of the people who we offer it to end up signing up for the rewards program. And that's like you go, okay, well, great that you can take all of our reservations, great that you can, you know, you can do our large parties, you can do some food ordering. And I was like, well, you're actually driving business well beyond just the the time of the call. You're driving it after the call because now we've got them in our database, they're signed up for our rewards, and it actually becomes this revenue engine that didn't used to exist because they weren't being upsold on on rewards. Right.
SPEAKER_01So rather than becoming just the kind of like system of record in the vanilla operational sense, it becomes like, I guess, you know, kind of like a sales force it goes from like a service cloud and sales cloud to a marketing cloud, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I mean it's it's like starts to become a a whole revenue engine to the business. And it's what's exciting is this like a revenue engine that was like an old revenue engine parked in the garage that never existed. And you like just put it there. Little did you know that it was a V12 600 horsepower beast. Exactly. So I think like this is where this world becomes very exciting. And it's almost a lot of this stuff gets put a little bit on autopilot. Like you you tweak and adjust here, you make sure it stays up to date on certain things. But it like you said it earlier, phone AI and what we do and how we do it with our tech, it just works.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. It works in like a very human way. It brings the technology out to everyone in a way that is not different to them speaking to humans, and you have drives all these benefits. Because you know, I always you look at like the primordial state of a system at the very highest end, right? And that's often the best it can be, if well provisioned. And you know, I think of like the better restaurants in in Belgrade where I'm from, right? And they've got that like the the waiters, the stuff, the general feel is very kind of like French-inspired, like many things in in kind of like 19th century Serbia onward. And you know, waiters who know what you should have, and you know, service that's like very professional, but not overly in your face, and kind of like a more American style where they'll they're there constantly checking in, and you know, each has pros and cons. Uh, but one thing that I always found incredible was you call up and you say, Hey, have you got a table for like three people? Yeah, when 5 p.m. Yeah, okay, a name? Nicola, okay, cool. Bye. Yeah. That's a call that took 15 seconds. It works because the person there is trusted to draw down a line that says 3 p.m. group of three, Nicola. Yeah. Underline. Whether they add it to a CRM or not, I don't know, right? But it is very different to when I think of the first versions of our experience where it would then be like, oh, great, how many people, like that many, da-da-da. You go through that. Oh, great, it's available. Yeah. What's your name? Nicola, last name, Markshitch, last name, Markshitch, last name, and off, right? And let's say that you somehow survive my my last name, right? Then, you know, there's some like GDPR-inspired thing. You know, is it okay to send you a text information? And you're just standing there, like, oh my God, that's why everyone assumed that the phone would be dead. Yeah. Right. And by and large, you know, we still have places where we ask for those bits of information. But I think that memory piece is exactly the important bit. Because if someone agrees that you can like use their data, next time they call in, it's like, I want to book a table. Table four. So today, 5 p.m., three people. Cool. Okay. Nicola, you've been here before? Yeah, cool. Yeah. All good. It's amazing. Like, we're back to that experience, right? Yeah. And not even that, but then you know, if you see a pattern and I call in, they see that I come in on Saturdays. Nicola, like, how are you doing? Like table for four again? Yes, exactly. And you go, like, no, no, no, it's six people this time, like tonight at six p.m. Cool. And then you know you can remember like shell physology? Yep, shell physology. Exactly. Right? And probably don't have to confirm it, right? But then it becomes like about that next layer of hospitality where then like AI meeting like high-end exactly, like up market behavior, builds a better version of that.
SPEAKER_00I mean, we spoke about this like just before. Was you know, why were people and hospitality people hesitant to adopt this kind of technol technology?
SPEAKER_01Because they care about the experience.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. Yeah. Right? They kick they they care about their customers. Like the more like sometimes people who aren't in the industry, like you get a bit of bad service and you're like, these people don't really care. When you're in the industry, these people and operators, they care so much. They like they care so much about people and the experience, which is why like the idea of putting an AI in front was was scary for them. And I think what we've seen, I mean, we've been doing this for seven, seven years now. I think what we've seen in the advancement of technology and integrations is it like feels real now. Yeah. It starts knowing who your customers, your customer is, who's calling in. So you have that level of personalization. Yeah. And that's like to the groundwork of you know t TMS table management systems, open table, is that you can you you know who you build down the info, you know. And internet terms they lay down the fiber, right? Exactly. Like they build a data center that you need for AI. And now and now it's just it's it's I mean, the quality of voice now nowadays is it sounds natural. We make it. Sounds better than I do in English, right? Like Yeah, my accents, my accent sometimes like I I mumble over some words. I try and non see it.
SPEAKER_01The only the only podcast with a mumbling seriban side after you like uh who's clear during the podcast, which is not really a surprise. Yeah, the ethnic stereotypes. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So I I I just think like what you're able to do to do now is like this is this is the moment where it's all really coming together. Yeah. And honestly, like it's so good now, it's gonna be better and better. Every year it's gonna be better and better with with all the next levels of technology that that come up.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, the next release of our LOM, Raven, V4, exact naming to be determined. There are some drafts, probably come you know, fully live in in about a month. My last name just works every time. Because the reasoning model within goes, okay, weird. Nikola, uh-huh, Serbian name. Let me let me try to decode the thing that came after, uses a different decoder, figures it out. It's I couldn't have imagined this happening in this timescale. It's it's incredible.
SPEAKER_00I mean, you I mean, you've been through the whole journey of it, and I mean you can see it. I mean, you know, like not through the whole thing.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, throughout history. You know, DARP started funding speech recognition so Americans could spy on the Russians in the 60s, but it's really taken off in a very like singularity kind of way. When you think of like these high-end properties, because I think these were always like the the things to win, right? Like, you know, I think we work with like Bo Koraton, we work with Caesars, we work with Gordon Ramsey restaurants, right? Like what sets them apart from like the wider kind of like market?
SPEAKER_00I think it's the the quality that they require, right? It's not a it's not a we'd like to be nice. It's if we're if we're not good, it's not good enough. Right? It's unacceptable to not be the best. That's when you you that it's not acceptable to not be the best. And I think that's why you know it's to to them, like some people were willing to adopt, you know, two years ago, yeah. To them, they've started to adopt en masse. Yeah. Because of the personalization, the quality of this. And look, frankly, that we're lucky that they're choosing us. We're grateful for all of the work that they do. But I think it it goes to like testament to when you get the like Well, they're choosing us because we're the best, right?
SPEAKER_01It's as simple as that. And we've worked really hard to win their business when the technology was at the cusp, right? And now like that has like downstream effects. Exactly. When you when you think of kind of like older school verticals, you know, I think that like even before the new wave of AI, you know, you've had like IVR systems by the likes of Comcast, ATT, Verizon. And that's where you kind of see that, you know, the trade-off of cutting cost to experience is heavily skewed towards cost. Whereas for these guys, it means lost revenue. It means I think Caesars were, you know, they swore that they would not use this when we first met them.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Here we are. Well, I I literally remember going through some of the customers. I won't name the customers that were but going through their IVR menu and restaurant customers, and it would like to make a booking, and you'd go click three, you'd hit number three, and it would go, please go online to this link. And you were just like, come on, there's like we are there's so much that you could be doing to capture Yeah, yeah, yeah. They say deflection, these guys are successfully deflecting revenue. And and I mean the best thing is the data that comes off the back of that is 100% automation, containment. Like it's not about it's not like with restaurants, you're not saving dollars and cents because the person is there working. Yeah, right? Yep, yep. The person is there working, but you're missing revenue. And that's always been like the big point behind this is like if you take if you automate all these reservation calls, and we'll typically see 60 to 70 percent of all calls automated, we book at 90 percent, 90 plus percent. Why would you not?
SPEAKER_01Would you not? I mean, to me, like it was always I thought we were, you know, in banal terms, just selling people the convenience of not picking up the phone. And I think that's a much loved feature of it because if you're in a restaurant, if you're pouring pints or seating people, and then you know, the feeling, especially in like these large sub-verticals we have, restaurants, hotels, you come to check into a hotel and the person's there on the phone talking, and you're standing there after, you know, an 11-hour flight, just like the cell, and you're like, please give me that room card so I can be out of your life.
SPEAKER_00But I think like a you know, there's always this like the one side, yeah, you you do the revenue, but it was an amazing story that a customer said told yesterday that at our at the off-site was when we implemented poly, it was the first time that our general managers at our restaurants could sit down with their team and have a meeting.
SPEAKER_02Oh, like the one at the bear.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, exactly. Okay, like without being interrupted. Right? They were always it was uh it's uh it's a quality of the ringing noise.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I've like you've spent more time in restaurants than I have, but like that sound is just always there in the background. It's so grating. It was like, I swear to God, we can't quantify this one, maybe one day we will. But like the impact on employee churn of that phone line just ringing.
SPEAKER_00They don't want to, they don't want to deal with it. Yeah, like they don't want to.
SPEAKER_01It's not like it's not written in the in their job description, but yeah, and it's nagging, like they're like, you know you should, but then like you should do something else, and yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Okay, how do you feel about the whole Gordon Ramsay campaign? Grateful that he trusts us to represent his brand. That's a weird. Thank you, Gordon. Yeah, like I mean, we've done amazing work with with his restaurants, and I think like the fact that he's willing to put someone with such high standards is willing to put his name behind us means a lot. I mean, you were with him on the day. Yep.
SPEAKER_01I mean, anyway, yeah, it was like one of the more it might have been the most fun day of Poly AI to date for me. Where, you know, as we recorded the whole thing and I spoke with him, we made some tweaks, like worked with him, his team. Like, he is the most genuine celebrity I've ever met. He is exactly what you see on the screen. In and out, like lovely guy, but also great banter. I think, you know, the like the perplexity of his language model is phenomenal, right? Where I think like Zhungwan point of the of the whole thing, he looks at like he calls this restaurant that has an IVR system, gets angry, and then he we'll link it in the description. It it's the most viewed ads of the Super Bowl. It's got, I think, well over double of the open anthropic ads views put together, even though the anthropic one was really good. More people might have seen on live TV because they would have paid for more, but we don't have data on that, so we'll claim victory. And what's really interesting is you know, he's recording, he calls this cafe called Cafe Ego. It doesn't work, and he you just see him throwing this because like cafe, cafe shithole. Like throwing this thing in. And we're just like, it's phenomenal. Like, you know, I don't think we produced the whole like kind of like uncut version of like all the phenomenal things, but I swear to god, he like produced double the memes and kind of like off script moments, and that's it was a real privilege. I find what like you know, my wife and I have watched probably every season of Hell's Kitchen. That's our like guilty pleasure. And you know, I find it very therapeutic to just like watch him yell at people because it's it's for good reason every time, and he just does what I think. Anyone who wants to manage really high standards and doesn't care, I don't think that he doesn't care about people's feelings, but he's willing to put that aside for the sake of quality, which is really kind of like what we what we try to do as well.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I mean I think he represents the brand. I mean, I also I remember my uncle telling me a very nice story that relates to this is I mean, he's so harsh in the like in the pursuits of perfection, but he also like the way he pushes that on people is actually it's it's it's a privilege to the people that he does it to. It might come off harsh, but it gets the best.
SPEAKER_01Oh no, and he cares and he's like a really good sport, and he like, yeah, yeah, no. I mean, you can t he cares about the people around him, people he works with, he's like really funny. So, like, you know, like he is I think the complete package, he's the real deal. Yeah. Cool. Where else is those kind of AI and hospitality go. Anything else that we can kind of wrap up with?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So I think look where this is going. We've spoken about all the integrations and how that all fits together. And I think that is really where you like I'll meant say the words again because they keep kind of coming. It becomes the revenue engine and it's the engine that makes sure you never miss another revenue call. That's what we like prioritize, simplicity and making sure you never miss another revenue call. I think where you start getting it becomes super, super interesting is when you start finding a true way to connect all the systems that restaurants work with. And that's when you start going like I'd rather have people call in than do anything else.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yep, yep, yep. Awesome. Well, Steve, thank you for joining me today. Please like, share, subscribe, and we'll see you in the next one. Thank you.
