Private Dining Operations Guide #11: Training AI to Run Your Back Office
What AI automations changed our lives to keep human-centered hospitality at the center of everything we do.
Last July, a client hosted a milestone birthday dinner on her back patio with ten courses and vintage pairings and did the thing we hear clients say every time “We HAVE to do this again next year!” Most people forget. Next year comes around and they’re onto another shiny, new experience. This June, six weeks before that date came back around, there was a draft email waiting in my outbox: a warm note to her with specific memories of the evening, asking if she wanted to bring everyone back together this summer.
I used to do this on my own, like an obsession. But Vendador has grown and being a tiny team with many weekly events, nobody on our team even had time to remember the event was coming up on a year, let alone time to comb through the CRM to search for event anniversaries.
Nobody on my team drafted that email. Our AI read the event CRM board overnight, saw the anniversary approaching, pulled what we knew about the evening from her notes and previous emails, and left the draft for us to approve. I read it in the morning, editing it with a smile of recollection about their favorite grilled prawns and the vintage champagne, and sent it. Whether she books again is her call. The point is that she heard from us, warmly and on time, without anyone having to remember.
That is the definition of taking care of your clients.
In last week’s guide, I told you that when Assistant #4 left for grad school, we decided to try handing most of her daily routines to AI instead of rehiring right away. A few of you wrote to ask how - so here we are! And if you read last week’s thinking you cannot afford a full-time assistant yet, this one is for especially you.
AI Did Not Design Our Business
We spent years building our systems and operations by trial and error. The software we chose, the client workflows, the CRM boards, the touchpoint rhythms, and the written standards for how we operate were all “done” before AI.
By the time we brought in Assistant # 5: Claude (on the Max plan) to the company, every task we gave it was a task someone was already doing. We taught it specifically the way you would teach a new hire: here is exactly what the goal is, how to do it, where everything lives, and what doing well looks like.
You cannot delegate what you haven’t defined. AI is the fastest, cheapest delegation you will ever do, and it can fail (regularly and annoyingly) if you don’t know how to get smart and specific with your prompts.
Could you use AI to help you design your systems from scratch? Yes. And if you are at square 1, it could change your life. But define the systems first, automate second.
At the bottom of this guide, I’ve attached the full downloadable list of Vendador’s AI scheduled tasks that keep our business running smooth and successful.
Client Notes Are Our Fuel
At events, we take copious notes in a little notebook: client preferences, the dog’s name, the daughter’s birthday, where they went to college, their favorite sports teams, etc. All of it lands in the client’s profile the next day. We have done this since Day 1 at Vendador because hospitality is reworking them into special gestures down the line.
The plus side: the more notes you keep, the better AI works for you! When Claude drafts an email or preps a new proposal, it reads the profile first, understands their preferences, past menus, the same things we would go look up ourselves. It then weaves these details in subtly and kindly.
The golden rule: we never, ever, let Claude replace our client interactions or menus. We are a human to human business. I am the one calling, the one on the consultation, I design every single menu. That value will never be replaced, and I have no interest in trying.
The truth is, it is easy to sense AI in an email. You have received those emails. So part of training Claude was having it read our entire email history, along with creating strict writing guides we keep that are deeply protective of our tone and style. And even then, we do not shrug and say close enough. We have taste, and taste matters. If it is client facing, hold it to your standards so that everything feels authentic to you and your business.
Start With Something You Keep Forgetting
The first task I ever gave Claude was client birthdays.
Something that has to get done, that I care about, and that I forgot constantly. It watches the client CRM board and flags who has a birthday coming in 6 weeks. Far enough out, it drafts a warm email offering a birthday dinner to celebrate them. Closer in, for our repeat and VIP clients, it reminds me in time to pick and send a gift. On the day of the birthday, it drafts an email reminding me to text the client. That is exactly what you want from a first task: real value, low stakes.
The second was market research. Every week there is a draft in my outbox with Weekly Competitive Analysis in the subject line: where we stand against the other private dining companies and premium caterers in our market across Google, SEO, and AI search. At the bottom of the report, it suggests about four hours worth of specific tasks for the week that will improve our rankings. AI bought time for us to focus on things like creatively growing the business.
Starting small built confidence. Working with it on these smaller jobs proved it was intelligent, that it could reason through our systems and solve problems. Once we trusted the AI’s ‘thinking,’ we handed over the first task that changed my life: morning and midday inbox drafting. Of everything on the list below, that one made the biggest difference in my time.
You have to earn trust with any new hire before you give them the keys, and this is no different. We had four assistants before this. Think of Claude as our (part-time) Assistant #5.
What Claude Runs at Vendador Today
For each of these I will tell you what the need was, what Claude does, and what we still do ourselves. Technically, we have 30 live scheduled tasks firing at Vendador and you can access the comprehensive list in the downloads at the bottom. But these are the main functions: