#268 - Hospitality Meets Christian Wiens - The story of Mercury being in retrograde

Christian Wiens spent his teenage years working in restaurants where, on particularly frantic days, they occasionally dealt with the constantly ringing phone by simply ripping it out of the wall.

Years later, after a career building and growing technology businesses, that particular hospitality headache came back into view.

The result is Loman.AI - voice AI built to answer restaurant calls, take orders, make reservations and generally allow the humans inside the restaurant to concentrate on the humans standing in front of them.

Today it handles millions of calls across more than 1,500 customers.

The journey there has involved manually checking restaurant orders, walking around a zoo carrying three phones, personally buying customers’ food when the AI got something wrong and discovering that even the best sales process in the world is powerless against Mercury being in retrograde.

We Cover

• Growing up working in restaurants
• Building startups before any of them actually worked
• Why modern AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to creating software
• The difference between an impressive AI demo and technology a restaurant can genuinely rely on
• Why Loman.AI tackled the difficult problem of order taking first
• Walking around a zoo monitoring restaurant orders on multiple phones
• Personally paying for customer meals when the early technology got things wrong
• The restaurant owner who finally got to take his children trick or treating
• Why Christian still personally gets involved in customer support
• Whether customers actually care if they are speaking to AI
• Hospitality as an innovation frontier rather than a legacy industry
• And the customer who refused to make a business decision because Mercury was in retrograde

Quotables

“We ripped the phone out of the wall so many times.”

“There’s never been an easier time to build a company.”

“I used to check all of the orders myself.”

“I haven’t been able to go take the kids trick or treating… I was able to do that this year because the phones were handled.”

“I’m definitely interested, but I’m not making any business decisions because Mercury is in retrograde.”

Final Observation

For all the conversation about AI, models, integrations and automation, the most powerful moment in this episode is surprisingly human.

A restaurant owner gets Halloween back with his children because technology took one persistent source of operational pressure away.

That feels like the interesting promise of restaurant technology when it is done properly.

Not replacing hospitality.

Not removing people.

Removing enough of the noise that those people have more time to actually provide it.

Although apparently even artificial intelligence cannot yet overcome the gravitational influence of Mercury.

Show Partner

A big shout out to today’s show partner, RotaCloud — the people management platform built specifically for shift-based teams.

RotaCloud lets managers create and share rotas, record attendance, and manage annual leave in minutes — all from one simple, web-based app.

It also makes life easier for teams, allowing staff to check rotas, request holiday, and pick up extra shifts directly from their phones.

To find out more, head to RotaCloud

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