Tim Mitrovich, CEO of Artisan Studios
Let’s start with an assumption. Mobile ordering is not hard. It’s just pointing and touching. It’s not like assembling an Ikea bookshelf. But does it leave you with a smile on your face?
No. Why would it?
Artisan Studios CEO Tim Mitrovich thinks it can. And he knows how.
“You can have intelligent, thoughtful interactions using generative AI,” he said in an interview.
Mitrovich wants to put his company’s Artisan Intelligent Ordering platform under the noses of skeptics.
The product consists of application programming interfaces developed with Amazon Web Services technology. It has an elegant simplicity for something so complex.
“We use slower more accurate models for trainings, and faster, slightly less accurate models for live customer interactions, because we’ve been able to generate tens of thousands of examples using the slower, more accurate models,” he said. “But it’s all the same code. We can point the models at whichever part of the solution we need and swap in the ones we want and take advantage of improvements over time.”
Handling your menus
Restaurant brands often have menus that vary from location to location, with limited-time offers flashing on and off throughout the day. This can result in a mountain of Excedrin for an operator trying to manage it all. Mitrovich says he can remove the headache.
“You can have a platform that can handle the changes that happen to those menus every day, be it with 10,000 menus, 20,000 menus, whatever scale you have,” he said.
Setting up your brand’s AI personality carefully is the challenge. As remarkable as generative AI is, it’s not yet fully capable of “yes, and” improv linguistics. You still need to feed it responses. This needs to include info on menu items, orders, combos, sauces, add-ons, and more. It’s a lot of work. And a sizable investment. But the ROI could show up on your P&L sooner rather than later.
“This is a solution for operators struggling with labor costs,” Mitrovich said. “Think about kiosks. A lot of restaurants are moving to them. As a consumer, you may order on one and only have an interaction with an employee to get the food after you place an order. That leaves room for improvement in terms of ease of use and a brand experience.”
Speaking of brands, Mitrovich is a bit circumspect about who Artisan is working with. But he does give one clear hint. “We are working with a large QSR that sells chicken but is not open on Sunday,” he said.
Last year Bill Gates said that generative AI has the potential to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, such as climate change, poverty, and disease. A lot of operators would be thrilled if it just handled their menus.
