As we are all aware, AI is all the rage right now in (restaurant) tech, specifically agents. These are effectively digital assistants that can be trained to reason and execute based on set parameters. But so far, the use cases for restaurant agents have been largely constrained to automating phone and drive-thru conversations, third-party delivery disputes, and hiring. Because of their reliance on unsupervised large language models (LLMs), agents from startups like Rebolt and Palona have naturally leaned heavily on communication-related tasks– labor arbitrage opportunities that mostly seem to come at the cost of delivering authentic hospitality experiences. But what if these startups took a first-principles approach to solving the most pressing issues facing operators? That is the strategy that co-founders Ivan Romero and Avi Chad-Friedman are adopting with Kintow, which aims to empower hospitality GMs with a hyper-intelligent copilot that allows them to make smarter decisions while automating routine tasks that take them away from their day-to-day tasks. HNGRY recently sat down with the founders to discuss their early-stage product and how it fits into the modern restaurant ecosystem.