It strikes me that the LLM, in some way, completely misunderstands the situation. 🔥 It has fallen into the register of an IBM commercial, rather than an actual product.
Regional fast-casual restaurant chain (~40 locations, 500 employees).
🤖 Currently paying $50K–150K per year for point-of-sale, inventory management, scheduling, and loyalty systems from vendors like Toast or Square. 💡 the 3% processing fee WILL NOT GO AWAY. 💡 should restaurants have loyalty systems?
🤖 Their general manager knows exactly what they need — she's been running restaurants for 20 years. ✨ in the future, the machine will know what you need better than the general manager with 20 years of experience. 💡 the GM will serve as a better foil to the machine than the machine can.
🤖 A freely licensed scheduling and inventory system, generated by a large language model (LLM) and tailored to their specific supply chain (they source locally, their waste patterns are seasonal), replaces generic software-as-a-service (SaaS) with something that actually fits. 💡 the machine will know what their waste patterns are. ✨ you aren't special.
🤖 If another regional chain forks the code and improves it for their context, the license requires those improvements to flow back.
If an 8-restaurant chain is using a piece of software, they aren't going to have a rival restaurant chain fork the software. Neither company has a software development team. ⚙️ the Build v. Buy question is for larger companies, with more important software
Some questions raised:
- Do they have a "scheduling system"? 💡 yes? They have a spreadsheet. If they don't like the spreadsheet, they can talk to LONDON ⚙️ the agent that manages the inventory system. it takes phone calls.
- Do they have a Point-of-Sale system? Yes. Always yes. ⚙️ is this a market disrupted by AI? no. the two limitations are hardware form-factor, and the stability of the 3% 💡 we use this as an estimate for the cost-of-chargebacks. transaction-fee price.
- Do they have an Inventory system? 🔥 No. They have an inventory management system. 💡 the Inventory system means they always have what they need ⚙️ and at a "good" price. Inventory management just tracks what you have, and how much it costs.