Why Kulina?

Observations

On The Rise of Artificial Intelligence:

1. Flagship AI models can now see, talk, and respond live with sub-second turn-taking. They’ve become masters of communication: they can understand intent, adjust tone, close the communication gap and do so really well.
2. Given past data, AI excels at forecasting data given the variables.
3. AI demands — and has begun to unlock — a new dimension of User Interface (Generative UI, if you will) and User Experience. Chat takes the most primitive form and leads the first wave of this new UI evolution.
4. AI functions as an abstraction layer between the end-user and the source of information (internet, training data, pertinent context, etc). It abstracts out unnecessary detail and presents the user with relevant information. This is one of the primary use cases of AI. Users are moving away from traditional “look up” to a “chat-first” UI.

On Food Businesses - Restaurants, Fast Food Chains, Bakeries, etc:

1. Most “work” isn’t cooking; it’s cognition. Attention (listening, recalling, transcribing), simple decision rules (mods, combos, promos), and coordination (who does what, when) consume time.
2. Most food businesses (still) run on thin margins (≤10%). Variance kills those margins. A drop in quality for 5% of service can greatly affect the other 95% of the service. Things like order errors and wait times compound — the tails/extremes, not the average, drain profit. Conversely, small latency reductions and improvements in accuracy can result in non-linear gains.
3. Customer Experience is proportional to employee bandwidth. A food business is only as efficient (or inefficient) as the number of employees working there. Both over-staffing (which burns cash) and under-staffing (which causes delays and poor service) can be problems. The tricky part is that demand is unpredictable, and having the right amount of resources at disposal to maintain throughput is key.

So What?

How are these observations related, how do the changes impact each other, and why does it matter if food businesses use AI tools?

• Since most work in food service is cognitive and pattern-intensive, and since AI has gotten tremendously good at talking, chatting, listening, and responding like a skilled human — instantly, at scale, and without fatigue - AI can be used to automate these tasks.
• People are moving away from sifting through websites for information to just asking AI. Just like how virtually every food business has a website right now, every business will need an “AI-first” way of presenting information (AI Store Fronts).
• In a traditional setup, a business’s throughput is limited by staff size; each task is a “thread” that needs a person. AI can run countless threads in parallel so there's virtually no cap (no pun intended ;). So, No more holding on the phone for a reservation, waiting for a server to check if the lobster bisque has nuts, or dealing with a cranky drive-thru interaction—and much more!
• In short, food businesses that use AI will:
  1. Reduce costs by automating error-prone, pattern-intensive, time-consuming tasks
  2. Minimize guess-work and rely on AI to make predictions, gather insights, and run efficiently
  3. Smooth out peak-time variance and increasing throughput without over-staffing
  4. Deliver consistently fast, accurate, reliable, and friendly service, 24/7
The businesses that adopt AI now will set the standard; the rest will be playing catch-up.

Kulina AI

What is Kulina AI?

Kulina AI is a company that makes AI-powered software for

1. Food businesses (restaurants, fast food chains, boutique eateries, steak houses, food trucks, etc)
2. Diners (anyone deciding where and what to eat)

Mission

Food businesses spend their time, money, and energy on tasks that AI can do better, faster, and cheaper.

Our mission is to:

1. Make AI-powered tools & software accessible & affordable to food businesses to help them leverage AI to minimize costs, reduce time spent per task, achieve peak efficiency.
2. Create an interactive AI layer (Chat + Generative UI + Voice + Map) for diners to explore places to eat around them, order food, ask questions, etc. (more here)

How It Started

The idea began as an experiment after I observed inefficiencies at my friend's fine-dining restaurant. He had just opened the place and on the weekends I would go hang out or help around (new biz probs lol).

During peak times, I noticed the waiters were spending unproductive time at each table answering questions. I could also read the frustration among diners as they waited to be attended, not to place an order, but to ask questions about the menu so they can begin to decide what to order. Waiters spent considerable time table hoping answering questions and this made them inefficient.

This unproductive time eventually adds up during peak hours to sabotage the efficiency of the waiter, and hence the restaurant. This is a real efficiency bottleneck.

Since AI was getting smarter and context windows bigger, my natural instinct was to make an AI assistant that had access to the menu, FAQs, allergen info, and recommendations from us. We placed QR codes linked to the assistant on the tables and told diners as we seated them that they can ask the AI assistant questions while waiting for the waiter.

We not only noticed a considerable drop in questions but also a drop in the time it took for diners to place an order. This laid the ground work for our first product: Kulina AI Assistant

Products:

1. Kulina AI Assistant
   • A tailor-made AI Assistant that food businesses can configure for their own establishment by adding their details.
   • It's a 3-step process and takes less than 10 minutes for most food business to configure. No on-boarding, no BS. Just sign-up, pick a plan, put the info in and businesses will have a ready-to-use QR code.
   • Features:
     • Generative UI for Menu (interactive)
     • Generative UI for Item Snapshots
     • Feedback loop for reviews & ratings (collects feedback, uses AI to draw insights, external link redirects to google reviews to boost ratings)
     • Handles FAQs, general Q&A like allergen info, deals, child-friendly dishes, best sellers, recommendations etc. All are configurable on the merchant profile.
2. Kulina Search

   Kulina Search is an AI-powered search engine (for the lack of a better term) for places to eat around you.

   In the Observations section, I mentioned three things:

   1. Interacting with AI calls for a new dimension of UI (Generative UI) to be unlocked. Chat has taken the primitive form of this and is leading the first wave of this UI evolution.
   2. AI acts as an abstraction layer between the end-user and source of information. It filters out unnecessary information and presents the user with what they need.
   3. There are gaps in the data. There isn’t a single, widely used consumer product that reliably provides, for every restaurant, a complete menu with photos, a unified list of deals across marketplaces, a mechanism for continuously improving FAQs, and real-time specials visible across all major platforms (Google, a restaurant’s site, Yelp, and delivery apps). Major platforms cover parts of this at a satisfactory level, but not all of it in one place.
      
      I will address why this is the case and what can be done about it in a separate post.

   People are trying to use AI to fill the “gaps” in data and solve problems mentioned in the third point (images, deals, FAQs, menu listings). Here are some examples:

   1. Andrej Karpathy, in his Y Combinator keynote Software is changing (again) and in his blog post describes a problem he faced. He writes:

      I sit down at a restaurant, look through their menu, and feel... kind of stuck. What is Pâté again? What is a Tagine? Cavatappi... that's a pasta right? Sweetbread sounds delicious (I have a huge sweet tooth). It can get really out of hand sometimes. “Confit tubers folded with matured curd and finished with a beurre noisette infusion.” okay so... what is this exactly?

      The problem: He faces a hard time picking what to order either due to lack of description or an image of the menu item. He writes about how he vibe-coded a webapp that lets you upload a picture of the menu and generates images of all menu items to solve this problem.

   2. Amjad Masad (Founder & CEO of Replit) reposted this from an employee at replit on X (formerly Twitter).
   

   The post speaks for itself! Rachel humorously underscores what current products and AI cannot do; and no, the replit agent came up short.

   3. Here's another example where Matt Watson from Carwow uses the Mercedes-Benz Assistant that's powered by ChatGPT from OpenAI. Matt asks AI to find a restaurant with 4+ stars that serves duck. He follows the AI’s picks, bouncing between spots that don’t have duck until, after a couple of tries, one finally does. The result makes me question if its Intelligence or chance.
      
      Try asking Gemini or ChatGPT yourself. What you'll get is inaccurate and unreliable answers that are a result of a lengthy reasoning spree and unnecessary web searches that burn tokens without adding value.

   These are precisely the kind of problems Kulina Search aims to solve: create an AI layer between consumers and businesses to fill gaps in data and communication. I will be writing more about this in another post and i'll link it here when i'm done

3. Kulina Canvas

   A suite of AI-powered marketing tools and integrations for food business owners and manages.
   
   Ex: using AI to generate flyers, professional-grade photos of food, and craft marketing campaigns.
   
   Traditional marketing costs $$$ and managers at SMBs find tools like Canva overwhelming (since they're not going to use most of the features there) and are not willing to deal with the learning curve. They just need a simple solution that abstracts out the functional complexity and simply gives them what they want. AI is their gateway.

4. Kulina Drive-thru

   AI-powered drive-thru assistant for fast food chains. Competitors are already working on this but they're headed in the wrong direction. I will be writing about this more in the near future. I'll either update this section or link the new blog post here.

Why Now?

User experience, product design, and the economy are at a crucial inflection point. AI has stormed through the doors and its capabilities are compounding and its adoption is growing exponentially. The restaurant industry has had long-standing gaps across communication and operations . For the first time in history, AI is capable, affordable, and accessible to meaningfully shrink that gap. I believe that AI will not just close these gaps but will fundamentally change the way humans interact with technology, create micro-economies, and be deeply personal. The future looks bright! At Kulina, we want to seize this opportunity and lead the era of AI-native food service & operations.