Olivia tells you how many customers you will have today
THANKS TO ALGORITHMS, THE STARTUP INCUBATED BY B4I OPTIMIZES ESTIMATES OF CUSTOMER FLOWS IN RESTAURANTS ALSO TO AVOID FOOD WASTE, AS CEO FRANCIS TANSELLA EXPLAINSIt was born during the pandemic when the catering sector was experiencing a major downturn due to lockdown restrictions and uncertainty about the future. Now Olivia uses the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) not only with a view to consolidating the restaurant business thanks to more accurate estimates of the expected flows of customers but also aiming to reduce food waste which remains very high in the sector. The startup that grew thanks to B4i-Bocconi for innovation, accelerator of the Bocconi University, was born to answer questions such as "How many customers will enter my restaurant today?" and even "What will they order?", in order to "optimize orders to suppliers, decide the number of staff needed in the kitchen and at the table, and organize everything accordingly", says Francesco Tansella, CEO of Olivia, a company developed on Zoom from an idea of a group of students of the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies and Scuola Normale of Pisa.
Potential savings are a multiple of 10 with respect to what a restaurateur invests by purchasing Olivia, i.e., on average, more than a quarter of the EBITDA of the business, again according to Tansella who is keen to underline how "in smaller restaurants but also in large chains there is a psychological obstacle to overcome because often the entrepreneur, even in a business city like Milan, thinks he or she can do it alone”, without grasping the impact of the predictive capacity of AI. Olivia works like a web app that processes the historical data of an individual restaurant every day, and combines them with calculations on third-party data such as local events on the calendar or weather forecasts, and communicates the results to the entrepreneur or manager covering a period of time up to two months. A mobile version of Olivia is being studied, but what is important to understand, Tansella comments, is that "the benefits also translate in higher customer satisfaction because the risk of running out of ingredients, and therefore dishes on the menu, becomes minimal".
by Camillo Papini
Translated by Alex Foti
