AI For Restaurants

Sterling and Aaron map the AI adoption ladder; seven levels for individuals, seven more for the organizations they work in, and why the gap between the two is the thing that should keep you up at night. Sterling wants a handful of SMEs building the tools everyone else runs; Aaron argues every single employee should be building and bets on-air that Sterling will eventually cave. They get into why y...

Sterling and Aaron go deep on headless products — software you never log into because Claude does the work. Sterling calls it the breakthrough moment of the year, Aaron admits Thanx hasn't shipped theirs yet because not one customer is asking for it. They break down why every operations manual is migrating into GitHub as markdown, why all roads lead to daemons, and the cliff you can never jum...

Sterling and Aaron break down the new agent stack and what AI actually does to your org chart. Sterling argues the SMEs (subject matter experts) inherit the earth, while Aaron insists generalists who abstract across problems are equally superhuman now. They unpack the three reasons to spin up a sub-agent (parallelization, context preservation, bias-free devil's advocate), what makes a session...

Sterling declares slide decks dead — his last board meeting was the last one he'll ever make. He's building HTML presentations with AI now and says in a couple months everyone else will too. Aaron pushes back with the Lawrence Lessig TED Talk approach: slides should be visual storytelling, not six bullet points read aloud. He's trained Claude on his own doodle style and now generate...

Sterling brings the receipts on AI search. He's been tracking restaurant website traffic and watched AI referrals jump from 0.3% in 2024 to 2.5% in 2025, with a projection north of 10% in 2026 — roughly a 33x increase in two years. He and Aaron break down what it actually means: GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the new SEO, Google reviews are the new social proof for AI answers, and mo...

Sterling has 15 go-to-market agents running at Chowly right now. Not chatbots. Not "AI assistants." Autonomous agents with specialized context, dedicated tools, and triggers that fire on events — like an SEO agent that sees a demo get booked, pulls the prospect's website, runs a full analysis, and has the results ready before the rep even opens their laptop. He breaks down the archi...

Sterling and Aaron go head-to-head on OpenClaw. Sterling calls it a massive unlock, Aaron calls it a security nightmare waiting to happen. They break down why always-on AI assistants are so seductive, the original sin of computing that makes LLMs inherently risky, and why both of them use these tools anyway. Aaron reveals he's managing 30+ Claude instances at once and has turned his workflow...

Aaron Newton burns through close to a billion tokens a week. Sterling's head of HR, who has never written a line of code, built a training app that replaced their existing one, complete with user roles, tracking, and a GitHub repo. This is what happens when you stop asking AI for answers and start letting it cook. In Episode 2 of AI for Restaurants, Sterling and Aaron move past the "shou...

Every single person has a moment when they're using AI and they stop and go, "Holy SH**, am I out of a job?" That moment is the red pill. And how you respond to it will define your career, your company, and your ability to compete in an industry that's about to change forever. In the debut episode of AI for Restaurants, Sterling Douglass (co-founder and CEO of Chowly) and Aaron...