OpenTable is increasingly embracing the use of artificial intelligence agents to bolster productivity and take repetitive tasks off the hands of human workers in all corners of the restaurant-reservation operator’s business.
“We look at agents both on the restaurant and the diner side of marketplaces, as well as internal productivity,” says Sagar Mehta, chief technology officer at OpenTable, at a Fortune Brainstorm Tech event held in Las Vegas this week.
Metha was joined by executives at Salesforce and Land O’Lakes to discuss how they are harnessing AI agents to improve business processes.
At OpenTable, AI agents are helping restaurants respond to feedback shared by diners online by crafting messages that are personalized, relevant to the guest’s comments, and in the right tone. Humans still oversee the work, but some of the repetitiveness of these tasks has been lessened with AI. For diners, voice AI is helping answer phone calls to book a table, though human employees are also waiting just behind the technology in case there’s an issue.
“There is a future where we trust these more and can tailor them to tone and what the restaurant wants to do with autopilot,” says Mehta, regarding the use of AI to address restaurant reviews. “We’re not there yet with that feature.”
Fears of job losses
Among all the applications of generative AI being explored by businesses over the past two years in the wake of ChatGPT’s debut in late 2022, AI agents have been particularly alluring application of the technology because of their potential boost productivity. However, it raises questions about job disruptions, in work ranging from call centers to graphic design to data entry.
AI agents can use foundation models to execute tasks—like whipping up a review response at OpenTable—and are meant to work collaboratively with humans and other AI agents. Today, a vast majority of businesses keep humans in the loop before any work an AI agent produces is finalized, especially when externally facing customers. But many executives have said they anticipate that AI will be able to handle those tasks autonomously in the future.
Cloud software provider Salesforce has been particularly bullish on AI agents, with plans to release the second generation of the company’s Agentforce technology in February. It also intends to hire 2,000 people to sell AI software to customers, and recently promoted Kaylin Voss to lead Agentforce, after serving as chief revenue officer for Salesforce’s Slack business.
Lauri Palmieri, senior vice president of solution engineering at Salesforce, says CEO Marc Benioff has mandated that each division asks itself what could be done if agents were let loose to work side by side with workers. “We’re bringing this technology to our customers, so we need to be able to use it ourselves,” says Palmieri.
Selling seeds and providing insights
At Land O’Lakes, CTO Teddy Bekele says AI is helping the dairy cooperative mine insights to help agronomists pull details from dense, thousand-page crop protection guides, and quickly extract the relevant information to share with farmers.
“The key ingredient in all that is not necessarily the bag of seed or the jug of crop protection that we might sell, but the insight that comes along with it,” explains Bekele, who says part of Land O’Lakes’ business is to sell crop protection products and plant nutrients, and offer farmers insights into the optimal agricultural practices to improve crop yield.
Land O’Lakes also sells Purina feed for farm animals including horses and cattle and works with larger retailers like Tractor Supply but also mom-and-pop shops that still fax in orders. To respond to those orders, Land O’Lakes is now using AI agents for some of the repeat functions like figuring out a customer’s new request, credit limit, and order history. A customer service representative checks over the work, but also has more time to upsell and proactively reach out to farmers.
OpenTable’s use of AI agents, in collaboration with Salesforce, similarly gives employees more time to work with restaurants on issues they may be experiencing with the set up of their reservation systems. Mehta also anticipates that AI assistants will become more adept at handling coding from start to finish and won’t need oversight from software engineers.
“There’s going to be more and more done autonomously over time,” says Mehta. “We just aren’t there yet.”
Spirit of experimentation
That raises questions about how much the productivity gains will affect the future of work. Surveys consistently show that workers are worried about it.
“I tell my engineers, this is not going to necessarily replace you, but if you don’t get really familiar with it, somebody who’s better at using copilot might,” says Mehta.
“I’m finding that there’s more interest in experimentation about what else we could do?” asks Palmieri. “What new professions are going to come from this? What new workloads could we tackle that we couldn’t tackle before?”
At Land O’Lakes, Bekele says he views a job as a collection of activities and that in some cases, AI agents will take on that work, leaving space for workers to pursue new work. But he also acknowledged that AI cannot do everything. He shared a personal example: recently, he learned that a colleague’s dog is ill and while Bekele almost turned to AI to write up a sympathetic note, he thought twice about using the technology in this manner. A message from the heart would be better.
“At the end of the day, I ended up writing the note,” says Bekele. “Probably not as good as what the AI would have done, but at least it was mine.”
