Opening a Bar in the Year of AI
Last month I opened P Town Bar in Pittsburgh. This is also the year of GPT-4, the year every software pitch deck in America acquired the letters “AI” — usually in a larger font than the product name.
A bar runs on more technology than its customers ever see: the point-of-sale system, scheduling, inventory, music licensing, the card reader that cannot go down on a Saturday. I spend my weekdays building software, so I chose those tools the way I would for any client — unglamorous, reliable, boring in the best way.
And then there is the product itself, which is stubbornly analog: a room, a drink made right, music at the correct volume, people glad to see each other. No model generates that. No update ships it.
I have stopped thinking of the bar and the software as two careers. The bar is operations with a nightly report card — the register does not care about your roadmap. The software work is operations at a distance. Each one keeps catching the other’s excuses. I would recommend the pairing to anyone. The hours are long. I have never once been bored.