OpenTable + ChatGPT, a Q&A

"It could very well be a significant or important piece of traffic and demand for restaurants." — OpenTable CEO Debby Soo

If ChatGPT, the viral chatbot from OpenAI, was a real person, I don’t think we’d get along. Sure, they’d be helpful, but also a bossy know-it-all; the type of person that steps in at the wrong moment to steal your thunder, like the colleague that talks over you in a work meeting or a friend at the bar who won’t stop shouting but isn’t saying anything particularly interesting or helpful. 

But it sounds like the bot’s about to start speaking my language. Last week, ChatGPT announced a handful of new partners, including OpenTable. The reservations giant is among a limited set of internet-based companies now connected to ChatGPT, and it’s teaching the bot some new tricks that could change the way we discover and book restaurants. 

OpenTable CEO Debby Soo was excited when ChatGPT launched, she told me. So OpenAI’s partnerships lead approached her about linking up, it was an easy and fast yes. (Her tech team agreed.)

“Internally, we had engineers and data scientists just so excited to work on this. It's incredible how quickly we got it out,” she said in a recent interview.

OpenTable built a specific API to connect to ChatGPT to give it access to the right data. Soo said her team spent plenty of time testing queries and searches — “geeking out on it,” she said. 

I can’t help thinking about that other bot, though, the one that went creepily off the rails as it professed its love to a New York Times tech reporter. Soo assured me the OpenTable and ChatGPT teams worked through potential negative implications and appropriate responses. “We’re learning as we go just as they are. We want to make sure this is a partnership that benefits restaurants.” she said. 

The 25-year-old reservations giant may have been early (by today’s standards, at least) to the restaurant technology game, but its legacy and market dominance only strengthens its position here. It works with well over 50,000 restaurants, and even though it has formidable, younger, and successful competition, OpenTable is sitting on lots and lots and lots of useful data. 

Soo has been in charge at OpenTable since 2020, and in those three years, the restaurant business has metaphorically flipped upside-down and back again. We all want to book tables now; OpenTable data from last year found walk-in traffic dropped 8 percent and online bookings grew 9 percent over a six-month period as compared to the same timeframe in 2019. And, in a favorite evergreen talking point that every OpenTable executive has told me every time we’ve spoken in the last decade, Soo said, “We want to be where our diners are.” 

Maybe this is where we’re headed. Now that ChatGPT can take us a lot of places — including to dinner — where should we go? Here’s more of my conversation with OpenTable CEO Debby Soo, talking through how AI might someday help us all get a great table.

Our conversation has been lightly edited. 

Expedite: Tell me about this deal and what it means for restaurants, because there are some serious ChatGPT evangelists out there telling anyone who will listen that this new technology is about to change everything.