Restaurant Megatrends 2018: Good Content Is the Path to Bot Recommendations


Skift Take

In a race to personalize everything, from your news feed to the ads you see, companies are embracing artificial intelligence to get to the perfect answer. But it's going to take much more human curation before the robots take over.

[caption id="attachment_212320" align="alignright" width="240"] Download your copy of Skift Megatrends 2018[/caption] We've just released our first annual restaurant industry trends forecast, Skift Megatrends 2018. You can read about each of the trends on Skift Table as well as download a copy of our magazine here. Scoring the absolute perfect restaurant recommendation — from a friend, from a stranger, and even from a brand — feels almost magical. As we turn to everyone from our friends to our phones for advice (and now even Amazon's Alexa has opinions), the prevalence of text-based communication can sometimes make you wonder if there’s actually a human on the other end. More often than not, there is. And until the robots can take over, all companies are smart to adopt strong content strategies to boost their cache of information about restaurants. “What we often see today is a list of every restaurant we think is best,” Reserve CEO, Greg Hong, told Skift Table last Septe