I learned one of the most valuable business lessons of my life watching my dad fix things around the house.
He’d spend hours trying to fix something himself, only to call a repairman a few hours later and have to apologize for how much worse he’d made the problem. (Thanks Uncle Phil!)
Now I know better. I don’t even hang pictures in my apartment. I wait until I have enough projects that it makes sense to call the handyman. He’s gonna do a 153x better job than I will, even if I watch 700 YouTube videos on how to do it.
These are next!
That same lesson applies to AI.
We all believe AI is gonna save the day, and you know what? It absolutely has the power to make a lot of things better and easier. But without the right approach, it’s no different than the tools in your garage. Used well, it’s incredibly powerful. Used poorly, it usually creates more work than it saves. (Have I mentioned that I literally still have my first tool set? That’s how little it gets used!)
I’m personally inside Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT all day long. I find Claude to be very helpful for business matters, ChatGPT is my choice for writing, and Gemini has some superpowers when it comes to local marketing and search.
The more I use them, the more I learn about getting the best results. I’m also seeing how restaurants and executives are using AI without realizing they’re setting themselves up for generic answers that don’t actually solve the problem they’re trying to solve.
Most of the issue isn’t the AI … it’s the mindset people bring to it.
They’re expecting strategy when they haven’t provided good context. They’re treating it like an easy button instead of a tool. They’re trusting answers they should be fact-checking.
Here are five of the biggest mistakes I see people making with AI in the restaurant business:
1. Expecting AI to hand you strategy when it doesn't know your P&L, your market, or your guests.
2. Thinking AI is the easy button, when the quick version gives you slop and good output takes real setup and judgment.
3. Blaming the AI when the problem was your lazy prompt.
4. Thinking it learns your brand voice as you correct it. It doesn’t permanently learn your brand from your chats, and memory features are too loose to trust. Build the prompt once and reuse it.
5. Trusting its numbers without checking them.
AI can certainly make you go faster, give you better results, and be a force multiplier but only when it’s used right.
Here are some tips for optimal usage.
1. Build the prompt once, reuse it forever. Your brand voice, your rules, your guardrails, written down.
2. Tell it who it's for and what good looks like. Context in, quality out.
3. Turn search on for anything with a number in it, then click the link. Ask for sources without search and it'll invent them.
4. Use it to go faster on what you already know how to do, not to decide what to do.
5. When the stakes are real, call someone who's done it. AI doesn't know what makes your restaurant different, so what you get back is generic even when it sounds sharp. AI is good for analysis and execution. Strategy still needs a human with subject matter expertise.
What’s the smartest way you’re using AI right now?
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Do you need help with your restaurant marketing or maximizing how you use AI to make it stronger and faster? Send me an email [email protected]
- Rev Ciancio
WHAT DOES REV DO?
*I help restaurants to build guest marketing programs.
*I help hospitality tech companies with lead generation and content marketing.
