I was skeptical, and honestly a little annoyed by it.

For a long time, AI in a restaurant or an agency meant one thing to me: a tool that writes a caption you have to rewrite anyway. I ignored most of it. Between running Quarry and running Wildcat, I didn't have room for another gimmick that promised to save time and actually just added a step.

What changed my mind wasn't a big announcement. It was small, boring, repeated uses that quietly gave me hours back.

Where it actually earns its place

  • Inventory. Counting and reordering used to eat a chunk of my week at Quarry. Having a system that already knows what we usually move and flags what's off means I'm checking exceptions instead of starting from zero every time.
  • Event decisions. Running the math on whether a food truck booking is worth it used to live entirely in my head, or on a napkin. Now I can lay out the minimum, travel, staffing and prep costs fast enough to actually decide before I'm already committed.
  • Content planning. Not writing the final post, planning the plan. What we're shooting, when, for which client, so a shoot day doesn't turn into standing around figuring it out on site.
  • Client work. First drafts of a brand audit, a first pass at copy, a rough outline for a campaign. Someone still checks and edits every single one. But starting from a draft instead of a blank page changes how much I get through in a day.
  • Getting unstuck. Some days my brain has forty tabs open between the restaurant, the trucks and the agency. Having somewhere to dump all of it and get back a clear next step is worth more to me than any single feature.

What it didn't replace

It didn't replace judgment. It didn't replace the conversation with a staff member who's struggling, or the decision about which client to take on, or tasting the food before it goes out. Those are still mine, and I don't want a tool anywhere near them. What it replaced was the busywork sitting in front of those decisions, the stuff that used to eat the hours I needed for the parts only I can do.

The actual payoff

More room to lead. More room to create. More room to actually be home. That's the whole pitch, and it's why AI coaching became part of what we offer at Wildcat instead of staying a personal experiment. If it gave me hours back running a restaurant and an agency at the same time, I figured it could do the same for the owners we work with.