Now AI is trying to gobble up dinner reservations

By T.M. Brown, CNN

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. When he tried to log into Resy, he found that he had been locked out.

“I realized after a couple minutes that Instinct might have done something,” he said. Indeed, it had. Given the job of finding a reservation, he said, the AI assistant had been pinging Resy “hundreds of times every hour of the day.”

“Of course I got banned,” he said. “Resy figured it was a bot which is a totally fair response.”

Resy said in a statement to the industry magazine Restaurants Business that it “does not currently permit unapproved third-party bots or agents to independently access or interact with the Resy platform.” Stefano, who has since had his account reinstated, said he learned his lesson. “That was my first time and last time doing that,” he said.

Speak to an agent, or just get your own?

Personal AI agents, like Instinct, are part of an emerging category of apps that act as digital personal assistants. Users provide the app with credentials like email logins and credit card information and then ask the aps to do things for them.

People have used AI assistants to find new apartments and cancel subscriptions, as well as to manage their own calendars and make doctor’s appointments. Instinct recently raised $350 million, and in September, Meta released Muse, its own personal AI agent, which has been downloaded more than 2 million times already.

These AI agents have been developed at a time when airlines, insurance companies and utility providers are making it increasingly difficult to speak to a human in order to solve a problem. After years of yelling “agent” during automated customer service calls in the hopes of reaching a real person, it’s little wonder why people are trying to automate their annoying tasks, even if it means unleashing a new avalanche of bots onto the internet.

Making restaurant reservations on their creator’s behalf is one of the AI assistants’ most visible use cases, especially as diners face the growing headache of navigating different apps and credit card reward tiers just to book a meal. Many popular restaurants have abandoned phone numbers and email addresses in favor of managing everything via their reservation platform of choice.

Apps like Dorsia, which charge a yearly membership fee of up to $25,000, and gray-market reservation marketplaces like AppointmentTrader have created a class system where deep-pocketed diners can cut to the front of the line. Personal AI agents now threaten to make that even worse.

Tables are for people

“We are dehumanizing the last standing experience that is still totally human,” said Roni Mazumdar, the co-owner of several award-winning restaurants including Dhamaka and Semma in New York.

Mazumdar is concerned that if some people are able to walk around with a bot in their pockets that can constantly scrape a website looking for a table, it’ll reinforce a system that is already frustrating restaurant operators where reservations are gobbled up by clout chasers.

“When the entire system is gamed, you create an environment where those who are excited by a place can’t even go, but someone who doesn’t really care gets to say, ‘Yeah, I went there’ for bragging rights. It’s just a lose-lose proposition,” he said.

“For as long as we’ve had hard-to-get-into restaurants, we’ve had people trying to hack the system. These bots are nothing new,” said Ben Leventhal, the founder of the loyalty platform Blackbird and a co-founder of Resy. He said that Resy did what it was supposed to do by enforcing its terms of service, but that the industry will have to adapt and evolve as people use new tools.

Leventhal added that the AI assistants do provide some easier avenues to bad behavior among diners, though, and reservation platforms need to find a way to deal with that. “People want to skip the line, and obviously that’s not going to scale for legitimate platforms,” he said.

Jeremy Mustakas, the COO of Jean-Georges Restaurants in New York, said that AI tools have been helpful in streamlining some of their back-office operations, but that humanity is still at the core of what restaurants do, even if costs some efficiencies. “Not every interaction or task needs to be optimized,” Mustakas said. “Our work requires patience, discretion, even spontaneity. AI can’t read the room the way a great hospitality professional can.”

Rogue reservations

Like other AI systems, these personal agents don’t always behave the way people want them to. Brian Distelburger, a tech entrepreneur, also got banned from Resy for using an overeager agent to look for a table at, yes, 4 Charles Prime Rib. And in August, Jason Yeh, a venture capitalist in Los Angeles, said that he prompted his Instinct bot to look for restaurant reservations for a trip to Tokyo.

“Instinct found an opening for a random restaurant I never suggested, and made a reservation despite the restaurant having a 100% charge cancellation policy,” he posted on X. “Honestly kind of insane how anyone would give them keys to their accounts at large, and they better cover the $200 cancellation fee here.”

His Instinct bot was apologetic in a way familiar to anyone who has used Claude or ChatGPT. “Honest answer: I keep running notes from our conversations so your preferences carry over,” the messages Yeh posted on X read. “The failure was acting on my own notes without verifying them against what you actually said.”

Some tech evangelists have suggested that this is a key step towards an internet that will be all bots, where one person’s personal AI assistant will interact with a reservation platform or restaurant’s bot and hash things out between them or even set up an “auction” to decide who gets the reservation.

Stefano isn’t sold on that approach. “If there are 1,000 agents trying to get one table and it goes to the one that bids the most, to me that feels almost like dystopian capitalism. That’s taking it too far,” he said.

Leventhal said he doesn’t think restaurant operators will want to cede control of who gets to eat at their establishment to bots. “The idea that these systems are going to become obsolete because of an agent-to-agent layer doesn’t take into account the broad context of how the restaurant industry functions,” he said. “I don’t see a world where restaurants get comfortable letting a bunch of bots hash it all out.”

“It takes the magic out of restaurants quite quickly,” said Mazumdar. “I just think people should get a fair shot of going out and dining and having a good time and that it shouldn’t have to feel like a game.”

“We have clear pathways to using the technology to automate the tasks, but they can never automate the humanity,” said Mustakas. “The technology should open doors, but it shouldn’t create a digital velvet rope.”

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