AI is coming for restaurant reservations

J.C. Bahr-de Stefano, a venture capitalist in New York, wanted a table at 4 Charles Prime Rib earlier this month. The West Village steakhouse is one of the city’s most covetable tables, with spots there on the reservation platform Resy being snapped up within seconds of their release. So Stefano turned to Instinct, a personal AI assistant. “I didn’t lay out explicit actions to take,” Stefano said. “I just said, ‘I want you to do this. Go do it,” he said. The bot went and tried. When it couldn’t come up with a table, he encouraged it to keep going. “I said, ‘You can figure it out. Come on.’ It was like giving it a pep talk,” he said. Leaving the bot to its work, Stefano turned to getting a reservation somewhere else for himself and his parents.