The anniversary an agent won't mention

An AI agent can book a table for two at eight and never mention it's their anniversary. When I was a manager at a hotel restaurant, catching things like that was the real job, and none of it was in the policy.

You learned it by taking the calls. Someone asks for a table for two at eight, then asks whether the corner table is free, then asks, a little too casually, whether you do anything for birthdays. You write "anniv?" in the margin. Someone else books for six, then calls back twice to move the time, and you start to suspect it'll be four. A regular calls and doesn't give a name, because they know you'll recognize the voice.

None of that was the policy. The policy was on the website: how far ahead you could book, the cancellation window, the card we held for large parties. The reservation book was where the actual work happened, and most of it was a person listening to another person.

Customers can now send AI agents to handle things like that. Book the table or move it. Most of what's written about it comes from the side of the person sending one: look how much time you save. Much less comes from the side that picks up.

From the host stand, an agent asking for a table could be polite and quick and ask for exactly what it was told to ask for. It would also bring none of what you used to rely on. There's no "a little too casually." It might be holding the same night at three other places, because comparing is part of its job, and it has no reason to feel bad about cancelling two of them.

I don't want to overstate how much of this is happening. Nobody publishes how many agent requests a restaurant or a customer service line gets, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who says they know.

Every front door a customer can use (the phone line, the booking form, the returns page, the support chat) was built for a person on the other side. Most of them do work that isn't written down anywhere. The cancellation window exists because of something that happened to someone. If you've run one of these doors, you carry most of that in your head.

That knowledge is what an agent is missing, and I think it's what a business needs most when it decides how to treat one. I'd want that call made by someone who has run the door.

I'd start small. Pick the front door you know best and name one thing it does for the business that isn't in its written description. If you can name it, you already know something the agent doesn't.