A restaurant owner used AI to find a lost menu and check her prices

The downloads folder had become a junk drawer. The owner of two restaurants knew she had menus saved somewhere inside it, but she could not find them. She gave an artificial intelligence helper access to the folder, and it found the menus. Then she asked it to compare her prices with those of nearby restaurants serving similar food.

The story was told by Fiona Fung, an engineering leader at Anthropic who leads its tools for coding and office work. Fung said she had been helping a couple of small business friends try the company's office helper, called Cowork.

Fung said she really does not like doing business expenses, and using Cowork on her own travel receipts felt like magic. That made her think of friends who work incredibly hard, sometimes on very small margins, and still do invoicing and expensing by hand.

Helping them get started was humbling, she said, because going through the onboarding flow surfaced some really good bugs. She called it a win-win.

The restaurant owner described her documents folder as a junk drawer and said, "I know I have a few menus in here and I can't find it." Fung suggested asking the AI, and after it was given access to the directory, it located the menus.

Then the owner went further. She wanted to keep her prices reasonable for both locals and tourists, so she asked the AI to look at comparable restaurants serving the same style of cuisine in the area. It came back with what Fung described as almost like a market analysis.

The owner recognized one of the names in the results and said she had just eaten there and thought it was pretty good. Fung said she learns something every time, and said the owners have been giving her great feedback.