Now AI is trying to gobble up dinner reservations

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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.

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.

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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.

“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.

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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.”

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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本月初，纽约风险投资家JC Bahr-de Stefano想在4 Charles Prime Rib餐厅订个位子。这家位于西村的牛排馆是纽约最抢手的餐厅之一，在预订平台Resy上，座位一上架就被迅速抢购一空。

于是，斯特凡诺求助于个人人工智能助手Instinct。“我没有明确指示它要做什么，”斯特凡诺说，“我只是说，‘我想让你做这件事。去做吧。’”

机器人开始尝试。当它无法生成表格时，他鼓励它继续。“我说，‘你能行的。加油。’就像是在给它打气，”他说。

斯特凡诺让机器人继续工作，自己则去别的地方为自己和父母预订座位。当他试图登录Resy时，却发现自己被锁住了。

“几分钟后我意识到，Instinct可能已经做了些什么，”他说。的确如此。他表示，在寻找预订的任务下，这款人工智能助手“每天每小时都会向Resy发送数百次请求”。

“我当然被封号了，”他说。“Resy 认为我是机器人，这完全合情合理。”

Resy在发给行业杂志《餐饮商业》（Restaurants Business）的一份声明中表示，“目前不允许未经授权的第三方机器人或代理独立访问或与Resy平台进行交互。” 斯特凡诺的账户已被恢复，他表示自己吸取了教训。“那是我第一次也是最后一次这么做，”他说。

像 Instinct 这样的个人人工智能助手属于新兴的应用程序类别，这类应用程序充当数字私人助理。用户向应用程序提供电子邮件登录信息和信用卡信息等凭证，然后让应用程序为他们执行各种任务。

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Meta声称其Muse人工智能代理可以为你做很多事情。我对此进行了测试。

人们已经开始使用人工智能助手来寻找新公寓、取消订阅服务，以及管理自己的日程安排和预约医生。Instinct 最近融资 3.5 亿美元，而 Meta 在 9 月份发布了其个人人工智能助手 Muse，该助手已被下载超过 200 万次。

这些人工智能代理的开发正值航空公司、保险公司和公用事业公司越来越难以让用户联系到真人客服解决问题之际。多年来，人们在拨打自动客服电话时只能大喊“客服人员”，希望能联系到真人，因此，人们试图将这些令人厌烦的任务自动化也就不足为奇了，即便这意味着互联网上将涌现出新一轮的机器人。

为用户预订餐厅是人工智能助手最常见的应用场景之一，尤其是在食客们为了预订餐点而不得不费尽心思地在各种应用程序和信用卡积分等级之间切换时，更是如此。许多热门餐厅已经放弃了电话号码和电子邮件地址，转而通过他们选择的预订平台来管理所有预订事宜。

像Dorsia这样的应用程序，每年收取高达25,000美元的会员费，以及像AppointmentTrader这样的灰色市场预订平台，已经形成了一种阶级制度，在这个制度下，财力雄厚的食客可以插队。而个人人工智能代理的出现，可能会使这种情况更加恶化。

“我们正在将最后一种仍然完全属于人类的体验非人化，”纽约多家屡获殊荣的餐厅（包括 Dhamaka 和 Semma）的共同所有人 Roni Mazumdar 说。

马祖姆达担心，如果有些人能够随身携带一个可以不断抓取网站信息寻找餐位的机器人，这将强化一个已经让餐馆经营者感到沮丧的系统，在这个系统中，预订名额被那些追逐名利的人抢走了。

“当整个系统都被操纵时，就会形成一种环境，让那些对某个地方充满热情的人根本去不了，而那些根本不在乎的人却可以为了炫耀而说‘是啊，我去过那里’。这简直就是双输的局面，”他说。

“只要餐厅一票难求，就一直有人试图破解预订系统。这些机器人程序并不新鲜，”忠诚度平台Blackbird的创始人兼Resy的联合创始人本·莱文塔尔说道。他表示，Resy通过执行服务条款履行了其应尽的职责，但随着人们使用新的工具，整个行业必须适应并发展。

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莱文塔尔补充说，人工智能助手确实为一些食客的不良行为提供了便利，预订平台需要找到应对之策。“人们都想插队，显然，正规的平台无法满足这种需求，”他说道。

纽约Jean-Georges餐厅的首席运营官杰里米·穆斯塔卡斯表示，人工智能工具确实有助于简化一些后台运营流程，但即便会牺牲一些效率，人性化仍然是餐厅运营的核心。“并非每一次互动或每一项任务都需要优化，”穆斯塔卡斯说道，“我们的工作需要耐心、谨慎，甚至需要一些即兴发挥。人工智能无法像优秀的餐饮服务人员那样洞察人心。”

与其他人工智能系统一样，这些个人智能助手并非总能按照人们的意愿行事。科技企业家布莱恩·迪斯特尔伯格（Brian Distelburger）就曾因使用Resy平台上一个过于热心的智能助手在4 Charles Prime Rib餐厅寻找餐位而被封禁。此外，洛杉矶风险投资家杰森·叶（Jason Yeh）在8月份表示，他曾指示自己的Instinct智能助手为东京之行预订餐厅。

“我的直觉让我找到了一家我从未推荐过的餐厅的空位，尽管这家餐厅的取消政策是全额收费，我还是订了位，”他在X上发帖说。“说实话，真让人难以置信，居然有人会把自己的账户信息完全交给他们，他们最好赔偿这200美元的取消费。”

他的 Instinct 机器人以一种用过 Claude 或 ChatGPT 的人都熟悉的方式表达了歉意。“老实说：我会记录我们的对话，所以你的偏好设置会保留下来，”Yeh 在 X 上发布的消息写道。“失误在于我没有核实你实际说过的话，就根据自己的记录行事。”

一些科技布道者认为，这是迈向完全由机器人组成的互联网的关键一步，届时一个人的个人人工智能助手将与预订平台或餐厅的机器人进行交互，并在两者之间协商，甚至设置“拍卖”来决定谁获得预订。

斯特凡诺并不认同这种做法。“如果有1000个代理商争抢一张桌子，最后却落到出价最高的人手里，这在我看来简直就是反乌托邦式的资本主义。这太过分了。”他说。

莱文塔尔表示，他不认为餐厅经营者会愿意将决定谁能进店用餐的权力拱手让给机器人。“认为这些系统会因为增加了一个代理间通信层而过时的想法，忽略了餐饮业运作的整体情况，”他说。“我不认为餐厅会乐意让一群机器人来决定一切。”

“这很快就会让餐厅失去魅力，”马祖姆达尔说。“我只是觉得人们应该有机会公平地外出就餐，享受美好时光，而不应该感觉像是在玩游戏。”

“我们已经有了利用技术实现任务自动化的明确途径，但技术永远无法取代人性，”穆斯塔卡斯说。“技术应该打开大门，但不应该设置一道数字化的壁垒。”