reeve

the reeve ran the estate so the lord didn't have to.

As models and robots get better, most food services turn into kitchens, not restaurants, fully automated front and back. A robot makes it and a robot delivers it, and Sweetgreen already has machines making the bowls in about thirty of its stores. Many will want to remain restaurants, but only a few will make it. Those will be the houses where customers are repeatedly willing to pay extra for the specific human premium that restaurant can provide. That only holds if they keep their costs low enough to compete.

So the best end state for a restaurant is to automate the back of house down to minimal cost, and use models in the front to take cost out there too, so the people can lean into the human side. The chefs get to be artists, and the charismatic staff, the sommeliers, and the people of culture get to be exactly that.

That's where Benjamin comes in, as what he calls a superintelligence wrangler. He maps a restaurant's data and tools into one system and puts the model to work across it. He's also the house diplomat with the people it buys from, like farmers and small producers with limited supply, where a person gets a better deal than an automated agent would.

Reeve hasn't started yet. It will be his own company, and the aim is to walk into any restaurant in the world and help it become one of the ones that remain.