Woody Wu · Forward-Deployed AI for Hospitality & Wine · REF WW-SA-01
THE SERVICE AUDIT
Where AI actually pays in your business, and where it does not.
THE PROBLEM THIS SOLVES
Around 95 percent of AI projects show no measurable return. Almost none of them fail because the model was not smart enough. They fail because someone automated the wrong thing: a problem that did not matter, or one that needed a human and never should have been touched.
Most people selling AI to hospitality have never worked a service. They cannot tell which of your problems is worth solving, so they sell you all of them.
The Service Audit is the step that comes before anyone builds you anything.
WHAT IT IS
I spend time inside your operation, map how the work actually happens, and hand you a ranked decision document: what is worth automating, what to leave alone, and what each is worth in hours or dollars.
You own the document whether or not we ever work together again.
WHAT YOU GET
1. A current-state workflow map.
How the work really moves through your business: service, reservations, guest data, ordering, inventory, wine and beverage, staff communication, reporting. Not the org chart. The actual path.
2. Three ranked automation candidates.
For each: what it is, what it costs you today in hours or dollars, what it would take to fix, and what you would get back. Ranked by return per unit of effort, not by what is fashionable.
3. The do-not-automate list.
The parts of your business that need a human, and why. This is the section that saves you the most money, and it is the one nobody else will write for you.
4. A projected economics summary.
Estimated hours reclaimed, error and comp reduction, revenue opportunities, and a realistic cost range for each candidate. In your language, not a technology vendor's.
5. A proposed deployment scope.
If you want to proceed, exactly what I would build first, on which of your existing systems, in what timeframe, and how we would measure whether it earned.
HOW IT WORKS
Week one. Observation and intake.
Time inside the operation. Conversations with the people doing the work, not only the people describing it. Access to whatever you already track.
Week two. Analysis and document.
I build the map, run the numbers, and write the decision document.
Delivery.
A working session to walk it through with you and your team, and the document is yours.
Two weeks, start to finish.
WHAT IT COSTS
From $3,500 for a single venue. Scaled for multi-venue groups and larger scopes.
Fixed price, agreed before we begin. No hourly billing, no scope creep.
If we proceed to a deployment afterward, the audit fee is credited toward it.
WHY ME
I am a sommelier and hospitality operator working at the highest level of the industry, and I build production AI systems myself. Reading a business and building for it are usually two different people. Here they are one.
You can see the work: The House Somm, a live AI sommelier I built and deployed, is at concierge.woodywusommelier.com. Ask it what to drink with the duck, then tell it you are not drinking tonight.
The forward-deployed engineer role, the highest-paid job in AI right now, was modeled by Palantir on how a fine dining room works: someone who reads the guest and has the standing to tell them no. I did not learn that from a framework. I lived it.
THE PART MOST CONSULTANTS WILL NOT PUT IN WRITING
I will tell you which of your problems is not worth solving with AI, even when that means a smaller engagement for me.
Anyone who never says no is selling.
TO COMMISSION AN AUDIT
Two audits per quarter, so the work stays close.
woodywusommelier.com · Forward-Deployed AI for Hospitality & Wine