A recent article puts Agentic AI in perspective. The author wrote: “Would you hire an electrician to fix your toilet? Of course not. Yet that’s exactly what hospitality is doing when we rely on general-purpose AI to solve industry-specific problems. You end up with the wrong tool solving the wrong problems, and the results show it.”
OpenTable gets it. In July, the company unveiled Concierge, a solution that uses generative AI to answer up to 80% of diner questions, drawing on menus, reviews, ambiance details, dietary info, and more covering more than 60,000 global venues on OpenTable. Powered by OpenAI, Perplexity, and integrated voice‑AI platforms, Concierge transforms the booking experience into an instant, conversational dialogue.
Why This Matters to Venue Operators
Imagine a guest asking: “Concierge AI, what’s the best dish here?” If your website lacks structured menus, tag‑rich descriptions, or guest feedback signals, Concierge and other AI search platforms might overlook your venue, even if you’re the most profitable spot in town. Without rich metadata and guest‑review leverage, your listing fades into the AI shadow.
This is not just about chatbots, it’s about agentic AI agents navigating the agentic web, autonomously aggregating, interpreting, and recommending venues based solely on available data layers. For marketing pros, this means traditional SEO is now baseline. Agentic systems evaluate completeness, clarity, guest sentiment, and structured metadata and reward those signals accordingly. How big of a shift is this you ask?
- Nearly 60% of adults, and 74% of those under 30, now use AI for search and ideas, making AI an emerging dominant channel according to AP News.
- AI‑powered search like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity represents 5.6% of U.S. desktop search traffic, and adoption is doubling year over year even though traditional engines still hold 94.4% share as of now, but the tides are changing.
- Bain research finds 80% of consumers use AI to generate 40%+ of their search queries, and brands face up to a 25% decline in organic traffic from traditional SEO.
- The global agentic AI market is expected to grow at ~45% CAGR between 2025 and 2030, reaching $47 billion by 2030 reports ISG.
The implications of these AI tools extend far beyond restaurant discovery alone. For platforms serving resort, entertainment, and nightlife venues, where dining is only one component of a broader guest experience, agentic AI represents a new standard of how information must be structured and surfaced. With AI agents becoming the default method for how guests inquire, compare, and decide across all types of property experiences, operators need to rethink how they syndicate, organize, and maintain their venue data across channels. Platforms that power these diverse experiences must now align with agentic AI standards, enabling smarter distribution and richer visibility across booking environments.
Consider This Playbook for Venue Marketers
| The Challenge | What to Do |
| Invisible Listings | Ensure menu details, specialties, ambiance tags (things like: “speakeasy vibe,” “high‑margin tasting menu,” “vegetarian friendly”) are clearly structured and embedded in schema markup. |
| No Signal on Reviews or Feedback | Highlight verified guest reviews, emphasize high‑margin dishes, and staff recommendations. AI agents depend heavily on sentiment signals to surface your venue as “the best.” |
| Thin Website Clarity | Create clear, concise language about what’s unique, avoid vague marketing fluff. AI skews and rewards venues with cleanly formatted, well‑structured data. |
| Digital Footprint Fragmentation | Consolidate info across OpenTable, your own site, Google Business Profile, review platforms, and social media so AI agents form a unified view. |
Are You and Your Stakeholders Ready? Here are the real questions you should be asking…
- As Marketers: Is your content AI‑structured with rich, semantic, machine‑readable, and sentiment‑rich?
- As Venue operators: Are menus, feedback, and operating details being documented and refreshed regularly?
- As Investors: Do you recognize that legacy marketing and SEO will no longer suffice. AI readiness matters for discoverability and revenue?
With Concierge and other agents like Gemini and Perplexity handling discovery, guests are dropping the idea of, “I don’t know, Google it” and going straight to an AI assistant with all their needs. And if your data proteins aren’t visible to that bot, you’re invisible.
This isn’t a fad, it’s a pivot. AI assistants don’t just search; they recommend, compare, and decide for guests. The venue that wins tomorrow is the one whose data looks perfect, not wannabe‑creative to an AI agent. The future of discovery is agentic. Is your strategy built for it?
