Taiwan is a food lover's paradise, internationally recognized for its gourmet cuisine. This also means the food service industry in Taiwan is incredibly competitive
Whether restaurants can survive and thrive for long depends on their ability to attract customers. Wowprime provided the challenge for the innovative food service division of the AI Wave: Taiwan Generative AI Applications Hackathon, held on May 18-19, 2024 by DIGITIMES, challenging the participating teams to utilize generative AI to create innovative interactive applications that drive customers to restaurants.
Wowprime also provided resources and data for the teams to use. The team named "Hoping to Meet the Turtle," comprising Yu-Xuan Liu from the graduate program of the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Cheng Kung University, as well as Wei-Xu Chen and Yan-Ting Lin from IBM, used generative AI coupled with game-based marketing to increase customer loyalty and draw new customers to restaurants. The team stood out from the competitors in the Wowprime - innovative food service division and won the honorable mention award, voted unanimously by all the judges.
People in Taiwan enjoy good food. This is the key growth driver for the country's food service industry.
A restaurant's ability to attract more customers is critical to its long-term operation. Hoping to Meet the Turtle used the Anthropic Claude 3 Sonnet model in Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes high-performing foundation models on Amazon Web Services (AWS), to analyze restaurant data provided by Wowprime and found the group of customers aged between 26 and 45 is the largest.
According to Business Wire, the global gaming market value is set to reach US$40 billion in 2024 and the 26-45 age segment is also the most dominant. Because of this, the team came up with the idea of incorporating game-based marketing in their solution.
Games evoke positive emotions, pique great interest, encourage interactions at a low cost, and build brand identity so game-based promotion is ideal for restaurants with a limited marketing budget. Apart from designing games catering to Millennials, the team also used location-based push notifications and Online Merge Offline (OMO) approaches to create winning marketing funnel strategies that enable continuing customer interactions and increase customer stickiness. For future enhancements, the team proposes add-on features including special holiday promotions, social media posts, and customized menus.
In response to the award, Hoping to Meet the Turtle noted that game-based marketing has wide-ranging applications. Backed by powerful generative AI and suitable data for training, game-based marketing can be used in all kinds of scenarios wherein businesses need to reach out to customers. Going forward, the team will stay committed to related technology research and find more application scenarios.
The team named "Hoping to Meet the Turtle Team" won an honorable mention award for their AI-driven game-based marketing solution to boost restaurant