Gastronomic Revolution: How ChatGPT & AI Will Transform Restaurants

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. chat gpt is disrupting a ton of different industries right now and on the podcast today i want to talk about how chat gpt and language models like it have the potential to really disrupt the food and restaurant industry specifically so we're going to be talking about some areas that are currently being disrupted what's coming next and how this is going to play out in the future so without any further ado let's jump into it something i would bring up right at the beginning of this is just the fact that the food and restaurant industry is one of the biggest industries globally.

1:00You know, it's something that people interact with, you know, food three times a day. So this is something very big. And the industry employs millions of people globally. It generates billions of dollars in revenue every year. So that being said, though, the industry is not without its challenges. So one of the most significant challenges is just the labor-intensive nature of the whole industry in general. So a lot of the tasks require a ton of time and effort. you know, whether that's taking orders at restaurant, preparing food, cleaning, and just additionally, the whole industry is super competitive.

1:33So this isn't an area where people can have really big profit margins, typically, because they're competing with so many different restaurants. It's like, it's truly commoditized, in a sense, just because of the nature of the business. I think one of the most immediate ways that it's going to be disrupting the food industry is just through the sense of or just through order taking. So essentially you have some McDonald's that are already completely 100 % automated and I think that this is just a trend that's going to continue. So essentially you can go up and just by nature you pretty much are programming a script or a prompt for ChatGPT that's saying you know this is our menu this is how much each item cost and so if someone orders something off the menu clarify with them read it back to them their order back to them and then send off the order to the you know the the person that makes the or the places the order the system that places the order so I think order taking is going to be a really big area all you really have to do is integrate some sort of audio function into chat GPT or into a similar technology some people are making fun of this there's a bunch of viral tiktoks pretty much of people making fun of it because it like couldn't understand their order and stuff so I mean I think that's only a matter of time I've you know done a lot of voice to text stuff it was incredibly it's incredibly accurate so it just kind of depends and then also we've all seen chat gpt and kind of what it's capable of so i think it's really not far off that people are going to be able to use this in a really powerful way for um you know taking those kind of orders and making that kind of stuff so i think that's going to be one area that's going to be really big um i also think that so that's all specific to chat gpt but i think ai in general has a lot of ways that it's also going to get into the restaurant industry and food industry and be able to automate a lot of stuff.

3:21I think, you know, just one area obviously is preparing the food. There's a full on McDonald's. The entire thing is automated, whether it's using something like ChatGPT to take orders or, you know, it just has robots in the back automating, cooking the actual food. And here's an interesting area I think not a lot of people are thinking about, perhaps. I don't even know if this company exists, but I've seen this in another vertical, and so I'll bring it up. I was recently reading about a robot that they're using an agriculture that will go into these massive warehouses and it will drive around and it harvests food.

3:51And it also, while it's harvesting food is in real time, taking pictures of all the produce that's currently being grown. And it can give really accurate predictions to the farmers of, you know, this is what kind of crop you should expect this year. This is how, you know, this is how much produce we're going to be able to create. And they may be able to, you know, forecast models about how much money. So anyways, I think taking this exact same type of technology, AI robot, and applying it to a restaurant. Sounds crazy, but imagine if there was some sort of robot that'd kind of cruise around your restaurant, and it can keep an eye on how full the restaurant is.

4:25It could keep an eye on, it could do a lot of different things. It could keep an eye on how dirty, like, plates and tables were, and it could, like, assign people to go clean them. Of course, you're going to have cleaning robots that are able to go and clean tables. That's a whole other interesting can of worms. But, I mean, inevitably, all of this stuff will happen. You see even with like Tesla right now coming up with their Optimus robot, you see Boston Dynamics creating, you know, really powerful robots that are able to do flips off of, you know, buildings and just all sorts of crazy stuff.

4:55These things are very coordinated. And so I think merging those with AI and merging these things with tools like ChatGPT is going to create very automated, not just, you know, so we have like the McDonald's example right now where they have an automated restaurant, but that's just, it's a drive-through pretty much. So you drive through and it's automated everything on the inside. I think you could get to a level where the inside of restaurants are completely automated to from the server that comes to you to the person that cleans your table. So honestly, it could be very disruptive, very interesting to see how this plays out in the restaurant industry.

5:26But no doubt this is going to be a massive area of disruption and adoption of this technology. So of course, there's gonna be a lot of people that are debating whether this is positive or negative. And you know, talk about the different positive and negative effects because inevitably for every argument there's probably truth on both sides. So it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out, how this all gets integrated. And I will leave you with this one last really interesting thing. I was reading a book this morning to my son and it was about this digger, this guy that had a digger. They called it a steam shovel at the time.

6:00And I was looking at the date of this book after I read it because I was like, you know, it was just kind of mind-blowing. But it was written in 1939. And essentially there was this guy that he bought this steam shovel so it's just an excavator but it's run on steam and he did all this construction projects with it it was great and then finally came along the new gas and diesel and electric interesting they mentioned electric because obviously that technology didn't come until much much later um you know it's still not here now but eventually i'm sure we'll have electric um you know excavation equipment but um anyways at the end of the book he found a use and he converted his old steam um you know tractor into uh into a heater for the town hall and he saved the town and whatever.

6:38It was kind of a funny book. But it just really brought up the fact to me that this concept of new and innovative technology coming along and disrupting, you know, in the case of this, it was like the gas and diesel excavators coming along and disrupting whatever was previously there and people, you know, really worrying about losing their jobs and losing their livelihoods. And then eventually, whatever the old technology was is either repurposed or something better comes out and you learn the new skill to use the new tool. And, you know, I think this is going to be something that is a discussion that has played out in a really big way in virtually every industry with AI.

7:12So it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out talking about, you know, training staff to do new tasks to manage new gear, making sure that your employees at your company are really dialed into what is happening and what is the latest in AI and how to use it, how to control it and making sure your people are properly trained and have the skills and you're constantly upskilling. So I think this is gonna be a really big discussion that happens in the future, especially as we're looking at big industries like the restaurant industry that is ripe for a lot of disruption, the food industry.

7:42And so it'll be interesting to see how this continues to play out in the future. Nash Falls is the relentless new thriller from number one New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci. When mild-mannered business analyst Walter Nash is recruited by the FBI to help bring down a global crime network, his life has turned completely upside down. Publishers Weekly says, in Baldacci's long list of heroes, Walter Nash is among the most memorable. Experience the full cast audio production of Nash Falls, led by McLeod Andrews. Available from Hachette Audio wherever audiobooks are sold. Also available in hardcover and e-book.