OpenTable's new AI concierge answers your dining questions

The most tedious part of dining out isn't booking a table—it's spending twenty minutes digging through websites to check whether a place has gluten-free options or high chairs for kids.

OpenTable just launched Concierge, a free AI-powered assistant built directly into its mobile app and website to handle those exact pre-booking headaches.

Cutting down the 21-minute restaurant research

According to OpenTable's internal data, 54% of Americans research a restaurant before booking, spending an average of 21 minutes doing so. Even worse, 27% abandon reservations entirely simply because basic details are too hard to find online.

When diners call restaurants, the questions are remarkably repetitive: 46% want to confirm opening hours, 39% ask about the menu, and 22% ask for directions.

OpenTable CTO Sagar Mehta told PYMNTS that Concierge can handle roughly 80% of these recurring questions. Users searching on OpenTable will see a purple bar reading "Ask a question" at the bottom of the screen. Clicking it opens a chat pop-up where you can ask conversational questions like "Is this restaurant kid-friendly?"

While Concierge currently focuses on dish recommendations and dietary checks, Mehta said it will eventually book reservations directly for diners.

Powered by 60,000 menus and big tech APIs

Concierge isn't just relying on generic public web scraping. It draws from OpenTable's proprietary database of menus, venue descriptions, and verified reviews across more than 60,000 restaurants.

Under the hood, OpenTable integrated APIs from Perplexity and OpenAI to power search capabilities and conversational chat.

This is part of a much broader AI push. OpenTable has been testing OpenAI's web-browsing agent Operator for restaurant discovery, integrated with Microsoft's Copilot, and teamed up with Amazon's Alexa+ for voice-activated bookings. They are also rolling out a deep integration with Uber in late 2025, bringing reservation booking into Uber Eats and offering ride discounts to diners.

Looking ahead, OpenTable plans to use dining histories and previous queries to make Concierge proactive—like recommending a spot ahead of an upcoming birthday.

Why it matters

For everyday diners, Concierge eliminates the friction of calling a busy host stand just to confirm high chairs or dairy-free options. If you already use OpenTable, it is genuinely worth trying out on your next group dinner search.

For the restaurant industry, table discovery is quickly shifting from static filter check-boxes to interactive agent conversations. Losing over a quarter of bookings due to missing information is a massive revenue leak, and automating 80% of routine inquiries saves staff significant phone time.

We think OpenTable's approach is smart because it anchors advanced models from OpenAI and Perplexity directly to its proprietary dataset of 60,000 verified menus and reviews. General-purpose models often hallucinate restaurant policies, but ground-truth data prevents that.

That said, the stakes in hospitality are unforgiving. If Concierge hallucinates allergy safety or out-of-date holiday hours, diners will blame the platform immediately. Keeping 60,000 restaurant data points continuously refreshed will be the real test.