Pierre-Sébastien Gauthier, CRO at Alfred Technologies, on the VatorNews innovation podcast

Alfred Technologies provides intelligent management of inventory and supply of wines and spirits

Some highlights from the interview:

• “Once we are fully implemented inside a hotel, sports venue, restaurant, we automate almost 85% of the tasks of the beverage operation inside those kinds of businesses. So, it's really interesting for them to see us as really helpful in their operation because we give them time to make sure that their guests, at the end, are well served. We increase staff efficiency, we reallocate resources for them, make sure that they can always be really present for the customer at the end, because our true goal is the same as these guys: increased revenue. We’re trying to find a way to increase sales on the beverage side of it, increase staff efficiency and make sure that the fan experience at the end goes smoothly.” 
• “Most of them are using still paper to do their operations and as soon as you get paper inside of an operation, you open up to mistakes: typing mistakes, double entries, staff efficiency isn't that really well organized because sometimes you will have to enter that data in a system or reenter the data in another system. So, just by managing this in a digital way, it helps them optimize their operation. From the manager's side of it, it's really interesting for them to have a real overview of all of their operations, see where they need to act. In hospitality, at the end of the month, you'll do manual inventory, and come up with discrepancies, variances, so you are always acting as an investigator, trying to find where the problems are. So, instead of monthly inventories, or even, for some operations, sometimes three months, on our site it's 24 hours. Every day you have those discrepancies, you get those variants, you see exactly where you need to act to optimize your operation, and don't leave any money on the table.”
• “We can go as precise as tagging every bottle; some of the establishments that we currently work with are tagging every bottle because they want to have that amount of control but can you imagine, honestly, tagging every beer that you sell? It's quite impossible. That's why we needed to come with a different solution to help increase control and that's why AI is really interesting for that because there's no human able to do all the triangulation of data that a computer will be able to do. But when you talk about the accounting department of every establishment, they all do that; they all triangulate data from their purchases. What do we sell? What bottle was requisitioned by which location? They all do it but manually right now. So, on our side, the fact that we put AI on this job, it's really accelerating the process for them and we can come up really precisely with an amount.”
• “When we talked with the Montreal Canadiens, they mentioned to us, ‘we don't want technology to replace our humans on site, because what we want to do with them is make sure that they have a more personalized approach with the customers coming up.’ They want to have a more customized approach with them, be more close to them, and make sure that they know what they bought last game. Is it their daughter's birthday coming up? They want to create a relationship with them. So, if you want to make sure that you want to create a relationship with your fans, with your customers, and you want to have time for that, that's why I can help them. I truly hope that we can help them and they see this in our solution.” 
• “It could come down to having a recommendation tool for the waiter or even training tools. Not every establishment in the hospitality industry can afford a sommelier or a beverage director, some of them, with the labor shortage, don't have a sommelier or a beverage director, so Alfred can be used as that because you can give tasting notes to a waiter who doesn't know anything about the wine and make sure that you can explain it to potential customers. The same thing can happen in sports venues where we can come up, in these precise suites we know that Bambi used to always ask for tequila. So, we can push a notification to the waiter dedicated and tell them, 'alright, we know that your customer is a tequila lover, we have a new one that we just received last week, maybe you can offer and see how she's going to react to it. Maybe she will be interested to try it and see how we can increase this fan experience at the end.'”
• "If we take a sports team, it's a four hour rush. It's like a sprint instead of a marathon because they have four hours to run their operation. serve everyone efficiently and make sure that everyone is happy at the end, so it's really a fast paced operation. And from what we gather, it's really interesting to them to optimize that because there's too much to lose in so short amount of time, so they are really interested in finding solutions to increase their margin, increase their staff, stuff like that. So, our biggest opportunity right now is the sports venues, we’re putting almost all of our efforts toward that. But we do have some traction in hospitality also, because hotels are interested. So we keep a team dedicated to that also.”