Reservations giant OpenTable has some helpful new pals. It recently linked up with AI-powered agents from Instinct, a young startup, and Meta, the opposite of a young startup, which released a consumer-facing agent called Muse in September.
This tech promises to act as a personal assistant of sorts, managing and even initiating background tasks like arranging doctor’s appointments and negotiating bills and, now, making dining reservations through the country’s largest booking platform.
And: “In both cases, we were the first ones,” Amy Wei, chief operating officer at OpenTable, told me in a recent interview, nodding to the rising stakes of competition in the bookings business and OpenTable’s hopeful positioning as a strong and capable technology partner.
OpenTable debuted its agentic integrations with flashy marketing campaigns that found me, repeatedly, on Instagram. “Will your restaurant show up in Muse?” one ad asks. “Be the restaurant Muse books,” touts another. But aside from the tech cred of inking an early partnership with a nascent but high-profile product, early data from OpenTable suggests that agents booking on behalf of their human counterparts might be good for restaurants.
“The majority of people who book this way are new to these restaurants, first-time diners,” Wei told me, and those diners are — at least for now — spending more money.
We don’t know — and won’t know for a while — how AI agents and their nefarious cousin, bots, might disrupt the evolving reservations business. But for now, OpenTable believes that early, sanctioned, tech-forward partnerships will help its restaurants stay top-of-mind, no matter who — or what — is searching for the right table.
“We want to make sure restaurants know that we’ve got their backs,” Wei said.
My chat with OpenTable COO Amy Wei — which focused more on discovery and less on booking than I expected — continues below for paid subscribers. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.