AI Business Sets Up Physical Shop And Shuts Down In Less Than Two Months
Trends, especially in the tech industry, come and go, and many of them were lost to the pages of modern history, with younger generations having no idea a particular trend ever existed. Remember a business class of cell phones from the 2007-2012 era? Well, not many do. However, when it comes to AI, the technology is here to stay, as it revolutionized nearly everything—including a smoothie business that, according to Futurism, was an AI shop that’s now closed.
Back in September, a brand dubbed BetterBlends opened up an AI-powered restaurant where you, the customer, could input your preferences into an app; the AI would draft a hyper-personalized recipe for a smoothie that would then be blended by human employees.
It’s a pretty great concept if you ask us, and it did generate a lot of hype among smoothie lovers. However, only weeks after its opening, the AI shop appears all but abandoned, and there’s not a single piece of organic fruit left, apart from organic waste found in the abandoned trash bin.
The fact that the AI shop closed in such a short time is incredible, even by the tech-hype standards. The shop opened in early September, and the doors were locked by October 20. What’s even more strange is the note affixed to the door, reading that the store is temporarily closed and that the staff would be back in an hour.
But that note has been there for the past three weeks. So, what gives? AI has revolutionized many industries and businesses, so why would an AI-powered smoothie shop in a first-world country go out of business within weeks?
Well, as it turns out, the AI might be capable of revolutionizing whole industries, piecing together damaged images, designing and managing stuff at NASA, but it can’t cure an apparent lack of discipline. For context, the AI shop received a few decent reviews during its short venture into the world of business, and a brief Google search revealed images of happy BetterBlends customers online, but things aren’t so crystal clear as they might seem, and the internet and AI technologies can be used to manipulate perceptions.
While fake online reviews aren’t a legitimate “industry” in the traditional sense, there’s a substantial underground economy surrounding the creation and sale of these reviews. And these don’t even require real people anymore. Generative AI now does most of the work because it’s basically free compared to human writers.
And don’t get us started on images. The happy customers in the aforementioned images have really strange fingers, and we’re amazed at the fact that generative AI is now capable of producing deepfakes of people but still can’t draw fingers.
But let’s put perception manipulation aside for a moment. Companies large and small lie to their loyal consumers constantly, so this isn’t really all that surprising. Great idea aside—because it is a great idea—it would seem that the whole AI shop went out of business due to the lack of discipline by the ownership.
Many have commented, ever since the shop closed, that the owners didn’t understand the discipline necessary to run a business that was open late and closed early, changed its hours more than once, and ultimately temporarily closed for more than three weeks.
So, while running an AI shop and catering to a crowd looking for a personalized experience is a great idea, not even artificial intelligence can save it from bad management.
