Execs from Anthropic, the massive artificial intelligence company, will soon hit the road to hype the business to potential investors. Anthropic’s initial public offering will probably hit record highs. Future piles of money notwithstanding, Anthropic is also using its platform to spotlight real-world use cases, including one inside a few indie restaurants in the US.
Buried inside the pages of Anthropic’s monster 300-plus-page disclosure documents ahead of a likely November initial public offering: a story about Shy Bird, a three-location Boston restaurant that found an early, creative, and useful application of Claude, Anthropic’s large language model that can talk and type to you.
Its use of the tools was creative enough to put Shy Bird, as co-owner Eli Feldman texted me, “right alongside some of the largest companies in the world.”
The Shy Bird case study, which briefly details the restaurant’s effort to restructure brunch service at its busy Fenway location before baseball season caused an inevitable crunch, appears after a star-studded list of case studies featuring Fortune 500 companies like DoorDash (which uses it to ship products 50 percent faster), Eli Lilly and Co. (whose researchers are piloting new science-specific tools), and Salesforce, owners of workplace workhorse Slack and its Claude-powered Slackbot.
Feldman is an early and enthusiastic adopter of AI in restaurants. I’ve talked to him a few times for this newsletter. I’m not surprised that Anthropic found him and his team and featured them inside its lengthy filing because Shy Bird, an independent restaurant, humanizes a large, potentially destructive, kind-of terrifying nascent technology. Restaurants are relatable. And, as the potentially $2 trillion AI company clearly understands, restaurants can humanize anything.