A pair of Albuquerque entrepreneurs are ready to take the artificial intelligence-backed technology behind their latest business venture to market.
That venture is a company called Hospitality Ai. Based in Albuquerque, it's built around an integrated retail business management and point-of-sale software technology. After a few years of beta testing with local restaurants, the product is ready to go mainstream.
Dr. Lee Caperton one of Hospitality Ai's co-founders, said the company is targeting the restaurant and club industry for potential customers, as well as other hospitality areas.
"Part of our goal when we started was that we don't want 90% of small operators to fail in five years," he said. "We wanted to use some of our experience both in business management and in the software development side to keep that from occurring."
Caperton is a reproductive endocrinologist who runs the Caperton Fertility Institute with his wife Kelly Caperton who is the Institute's founder. He also operates several restaurant businesses including Tamashi, Poki Poki Cevicheria and Thai Boran.
Those establishments, alongside The Sweet Cup and Poke Serrano, all used the Hospitality Ai platform in its beta testing stage, Caperton told Albuquerque Business First. Caperton and Corey Fiala, the other Hospitality Ai co-founder, used feedback from those restaurants to help shape the technology and fine-tune the product.
Fiala co-founded Lavu Inc. in 2010, a software company that Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller previously said "is kind of our Microsoft." He left that company in 2017 while leading a different company he helped found in 2009, Event Rental Systems. He's still leading the Albuquerque-based rental system company, which has about 60 employees after it acquired Austin-based company Dumpster Rental Systems in late 2021.
The Hospitality Ai system costs a flat monthly fee of $99, and Caperton said the system is a net-revenue generating product.
Part of that revenue generation comes from how the system uses artificial intelligence, Fiala said. The system's AI model can analyze customer behavior and monitor the cost of inventory items.
And the system uses AI for content generation, too, he added. Restaurants with lots of menu items can generate unique pages for each item using AI, for example.
"Our goal is not just to get the software product in and walk away, but to help people understand how to use some of the algorithmic thinking and also use some of our experience as a team to help them be successful," Caperton said.
Alongside Caperton and Fiala, Hospitality Ai has three other staff, including Camilla Dominguez as director of operations, Brian Dennedy as principal software developer and Audra Kent as creative and marketing executive. Fiala said now that the product is ready to hit the market the company is looking to hire a few additional customer service-oriented roles.
