AI Masterclass 1.11
3 ways AI can help lessen admin tasks for your hospitality business
Help & support
- ChatGPT can automate repeatable processes and the challenging administrative tasks business owners face every day.
- Customer service AI applications, like responding to customer reviews online, can save business owners valuable time.
- To ensure accuracy, users must always verify the response AI suggests before actioning.
Q: How can AI help with my café’s admin?
A: There are many ways to make use of AI in hospitality and the good news is, there are more applications emerging all the time. “AI can easily handle everyday tasks like scheduling, rostering and basic admin. It has also gotten much better at producing design, images and visual canvases. But in the future, it’s going to become even more powerful,” says OpenAI expert, Joel Solomons.
“The key is to simply start using it – and start using it now. You need to build that comfort level so you can leverage more advanced capabilities in the future.”
Every café owner knows the bone-tired weariness you feel after a day on your feet making coffee, so it’s no surprise that sitting down to start your after-hours job – the business admin – doesn’t fill you with joy. But there’s a way to streamline those repeatable processes. Here are three ways to use AI in hospitality that may help.
How to master the art of AI rostering
The weekly roster is a juggle at best, a recurring nightmare at worst but ChatGPT can remove the mental load – all you need to do is give it a go.
“When it comes to the language and prompting, I always recommend asking ChatGPT a direct question,” says Solomons. For example, literally type: ‘I am a café owner. How can you help me with rostering?’ From there, it will give you ideas and tailored plans on what you can do. You can also ask it to ask you questions for further detail to help build a better reply.”
Here’s a sample prompt: To save even more time, cut and paste this prompt into ChatGPT, adding your own details:
“I’m a café owner in [add location]. I need a roster for [add opening hours]. The available staff I have are [add details].
“I need two people for the morning rush and three during lunch. I predict we will be busier on Saturday due to [insert details].
“Draft a roster using these constraints, factoring in breaks and flagging potential issues.”
ChatGPT will create a roster, which you then need to check before posting it for your staff.
Increase the accuracy: Connecting ChatGPT to your apps like Microsoft 365 or Google Drive and giving it access to your point of sale (POS) will help make your rosters more accurate and help AI ensure more efficient staffing levels. Read how to Connect ChatGPT to your apps.
Using AI in customer service
ChatGPT can also take some of the load out of tough administrative tasks. “If you’re responding to a customer at 10:00pm, you might be tired or a bit too direct,” says Solomons. “AI helps you sound polished, professional and balanced, without coming across as defensive.”
Try this prompt:
“A customer left this 3-star online review: ‘[Copy and paste the review]’. Write a professional, warm and non-defensive response. Invite them back for a complimentary coffee to make it right.”
Increase the efficiency: Save the responses you’ve reviewed into a document. Once you’ve connected ChatGPT to your apps, you can ask it to analyse the file for customer trends and areas you can improve your business.
Predict stock levels with AI
There’s a balancing act all café owners maintain between running out of stock or having too much and throwing produce out. AI can help walk that tightrope. “We call jobs like this ‘low-hanging fruit’ for businesses,” says Solomons. “Once you automate these basic tasks, you can confidently move into more advanced use cases for AI, like marketing and trends forecasting.”
Again, specificity matters – for example, you might know there’s an event at a school nearby this week that will increase foot traffic.
Here’s a sample prompt:
“Here are my daily covers for the past four weeks: [Paste Data]. There is [insert event] happening this Saturday. Based on this, estimate likely demand and suggest my order for next week.”
Increase your savings: Once you’ve been doing this for a few weeks, get ChatGPT to review the stock levels with the covers and ask it to highlight the menu items that aren’t performing or some small tweaks you can make to reduce waste.