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At the end of a long week, many Americans might be looking for the camaraderie of the local watering hole, complete with the friendly barkeep, ready with a clean glass and a sympathetic ear.
One of them is a perky young woman with red hair named Cecilia. “Hey,” she’ll say. “What would you like to drink?”
Cecilia can make a swell gin and tonic, but if it’s a common touch you’re looking for, you might want to try the bar up the block. Cecilia is an AI-powered bartender who exists only on a touchscreen attached to a beverage machine. She is “not your typical bartender,” according to her maker’s website. “She makes delicious cocktails… chats with customers, tells jokes, promotes your brand, and provides an unforgettable experience.”
And perhaps, soon enough, an unavoidable one.
While AI hasn’t booted human bartenders out of their jobs en masse, for the past several years, Bacardi—whose portfolio includes Grey Goose vodka and tequila brand Patrón—has been investing its money to help ensure that it doesn’t.
Bacardi is expanding a global training initiative called Shake Your Future. The program (free of charge for those selected), bestows its graduates with an international bartender certification and has pledged to mint 10,000 mixologists by 2030. In February, it added Glasgow to a long list of European cities where it already operates.
“The techniques of being a great bartender [include] the broader skills around hospitality itself,” said Alex Tomlin, SVP and head of marketing for Bacardi North America, “which is essentially about customer interaction.”
Just as artificial intelligence has crept into professions like finance, retail, and content creation, it’s been heading for the corner pub, too. In 2019, for example, U.K. startup DataSparq debuted its AI Bar, which uses facial-recognition technology to serve patrons in the order they walked in the door. Last year, Diageo introduced a digital platform called What’s Your Cocktail?, which uses the company’s FlavorPrint AI technology to generate personalized libations. In the back room, meanwhile, AI management app Backbar can crunch customer data to predict demand, control inventory, and order booze.
Like many in the business, Tomlin has watched the growth of AI. He appreciates its power to help cut waste, boost margins, and even concoct some novel drink recipes.
“But none of that changes the importance of why people go to bars,” he told ADWEEK, “which is all about human interaction.”
In 2022, the liquor giant created Future Proof, a specialized curriculum for students at Florida International University’s Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism. The training goes beyond how to pour drinks and into mixology’s finer points including cocktail history and spirits distillation.
Cocktails and conversation
As AI expands its presence in business, futurist, and author Steve Brown has come to regard work as falling into three categories—what can be automated, what can’t be automated, and what could be automated but probably shouldn’t be.
“Bartending and mixology will (mostly) fall into this third category of work,” he said. “When people order a drink… it comes with the human-to-human connection of a warm welcome, expert assistant to choose a libation that meets their mood and palette, and the entertainment of watching the cocktail be made.”
Joseph Bruno, president of the American Bartenders School, takes a similar view.
“There are strong cases for how AI can improve the bar business overall,” Bruno said. “But I’m a firm believer in the fact that the usefulness of bartenders is based on their personality.”
Culinary Workers Union Local 226 represents 60,000 bartenders and restaurant workers in the historically boozy Nevada cities of Las Vegas and Reno. Not caring to wait and see whether AI would chip away at its members’ jobs, the union “negotiated a strong contract in 2018 to win innovative technology language that protects workers when [a] company brings in new technology,” the local said in a statement to ADWEEK. It strengthened these security measures further in 2023.
Where virtual bartenders do work
Meanwhile, AI-powered devices serving the actual drinks remain something of a novelty, for now anyway. Ceclia’s builders did not respond to ADWEEK’s request for comment by press time, but Tomlin believes what he calls “high-throughput, low-involvement situations like a stadium” would be suited to Cecilia, but not more upmarket settings.
In Las Vegas, there’s also an establishment called the Tipsy Robot where the bartender is a universally jointed arm that can mix the drink of your choice. It drew national media when it opened inside Planet Hollywood in 2017, but the concept has not proliferated.
Why? One commenter on a YouTube video of the device in action apparently sums up the feelings of many.
“Never replace a human bartender!” read the post. “I have no desire to tell a robot my troubles.”
