Singapore’s shops and restaurants scoring quick wins with AI
These include automated staff rostering, reservation management, customer service and administrative work.
Singapore's retail and food and beverage sectors are rapidly embracing artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline operations and boost efficiency. Beachside Italian restaurant Fico has seen a 2% increase in weekend revenue after implementing an AI tool to predict optimal booking times, according to The Lo & Behold Group's chief operating officer Rifeng Gao.
The tool, built using Anthropic's Claude Code, analyzes historical reservation data, dining durations, and guest habits to safely accept more bookings than the restaurant's physical capacity.
More than 24,500 retail firms and 53,000 licensed food establishments in Singapore employed around 142,000 and 111,600 workers respectively in 2023 and 2024, highlighting the significant labor-intensive nature of these sectors. Retail businesses and food service operators are turning to AI for quick wins such as automated staff rostering, reservation management, customer helpdesk management, marketing content generation, and administrative paperwork.
Compelling examples include Castlery, a Singapore-based furniture retailer, which has reduced its average response time for online customer inquiries by 34% through AI. The company's web-based personal shopping assistant, Casa AI, handles routine inquiries 24/7, while human agents focus on more complex issues. In the US, retail giant The Home Depot has introduced AI voice agents to handle phone queries, freeing up in-store associates for more complex interactions.
As e-commerce behemoths Lazada, Shopee, and Amazon harness AI's potential, they focus on targeted recommendations, fraud prevention, and optimized delivery windows, leveraging vast consumer data and logistics networks. While sophisticated AI implementations like automated stir-fry meal preparation machines in China and AI-powered beauty kiosks in South Korea and Japan remain sci-fi, Singapore's practical AI applications demonstrate tangible wins in productivity and cost savings.
Written by urgent.news from Straits Times's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.