The More Technology Advances, the More I Bet on What It Can’t Replace

Over the past several months, I’ve been spending a significant amount of time working with AI. Not observing it from a distance or reading about it in abstract terms, but using it directly in the day-to-day work of building our business. What started as curiosity has quickly turned into something closer to a daily operating rhythm. I use ChatGPT and Claude constantly as thought partners pressure-testing ideas, refining messaging, working through decisions in real time. In parallel, I’ve been experimenting more deeply with tools like Claude CoWork, not just to assist with thinking, but to actually build.

We recently used Claude CoWork to autonomously rebuild meaningful portions of our website. Not just drafting copy, but structuring pages, organizing content, and iterating toward something that better reflects who we are as a business. At the same time, I’ve worked with it to create automated dashboards across our locations - systems that pull in data, organize it, and present it in ways that are immediately usable. Things that historically would have required significant time, technical resources, or simply wouldn’t have gotten done at all are now happening faster, cleaner, and with a level of flexibility that feels entirely new.

The experience has been both impressive and clarifying. Impressive in the obvious sense — these tools are improving at a pace that’s difficult to fully comprehend and the gap between idea and execution is collapsing quickly. But more importantly, clarifying in what it reveals about where value is actually moving. Because the more I use these tools, the less I believe the opportunity is simply to automate everything possible. If anything, it’s pushing me in the opposite direction.

It is becoming increasingly clear that as technology accelerates, particularly in the direction of artificial intelligence, the most valuable things are not the ones it improves. They are the ones it cannot replicate.

For most of modern business history, advantage has come from some form of efficiency. You build systems that reduce variability, eliminate friction, and allow you to produce more with less. Technology has always been a lever in that direction, and AI is simply the most powerful version of that lever we’ve ever seen. It compresses time, reduces cost, and expands capability in ways that were previously inaccessible. Entire categories of work are being simplified or removed altogether, and the instinct is understandably to follow that path as far as it will go.

But underneath that, something more subtle is happening. As the world becomes more efficient, more digital, and more optimized, the relative value of what is not efficient, not digital, and not optimized begins to rise. Not because those things have changed, but because everything around them has. The baseline shifts, and what once felt ordinary starts to feel scarce.

That shift is at the center of how I think about what we are building with The 601 Group. Our decision to focus on experience-driven hospitality is not a rejection of technology. It is a direct response to where technology is heading. The more capable these tools become, the more they remove the need for certain types of interaction. Transactions become seamless. Information becomes instant. Communication becomes constant but increasingly abstracted. And in that environment, the desire for something tangible… something physical, something shared does not go away. If anything, it intensifies.

At For Crêpe Sake and Brown Butter, that shows up in small but meaningful ways. These are not just places to get food. They are environments that people return to because they feel familiar, slightly personal, and just removed enough from the rest of their day to register. They are quick experiences, but they are still experiences. They require presence, even if only for a short period of time.

At The Local Epicurean, the model is more explicit. The entire concept is built around participation. People don’t just arrive and consume something that has been prepared for them. They engage. They cook. They interact with each other and with our instructors. They move through a sequence that is intentionally designed to slow things down just enough to create connection. It is not optimized for speed in the traditional sense. It is optimized for something else entirely.

And that distinction matters more now than it would have even a few years ago. Because as digital experiences improve, they don’t just replace bad physical experiences, they replace average ones. If convenience is the primary value proposition, technology will almost always win. If something can be delivered faster, cheaper, and with less effort, it will be. Which means the middle of the market - the generic, undifferentiated physical experience begins to erode. What remains are the things that are distinct enough, intentional enough, and human enough to justify their existence.

This is where our bet sits. Not on competing with technology in areas where it is clearly superior, but on building in the spaces it leaves behind.

What has become increasingly interesting is that the more we integrate AI into our operations, the more it strengthens this position rather than undermines it. When reporting and analysis are automated, we spend less time gathering information and more time interpreting it. When systems are easier to build and iterate, we can improve how we present and deliver our experience without getting bogged down in the mechanics. When I use ChatGPT or Claude as thought partners, it doesn’t replace judgment, it sharpens it. It allows me to move faster through ideas, which creates more space to focus on the parts of the business that actually require human attention.

In other words, AI is extraordinarily effective at handling the things that should be efficient. And by doing so, it creates more capacity to invest in the things that shouldn’t be.

Food, in particular, remains one of the most durable mediums for this kind of investment. Not because it is immune to change, but because of what it represents. It is one of the few universal experiences that consistently brings people together in a physical space. It carries emotional weight. It encourages presence. And when you layer in participation… when people are not just consuming but creating, it becomes something more enduring. It shifts from being a transaction to being a memory.

That is ultimately what we are trying to build toward. Not just businesses that generate revenue, but environments that people choose to enter because of how they make them feel. Experiences that are difficult to replicate not because they are complex, but because they are human.

As we look ahead to expansion—whether that is new locations for The Local Epicurean or continued growth across our other concepts—the objective is not to scale by making things more uniform. It is to scale by making something specific repeatable without losing what makes it meaningful. That is a more difficult path. It requires discipline, clarity, and a constant willingness to refine. But it also creates a kind of durability that is increasingly rare.

I plan to continue going deeper with AI. I want to understand it as fully as possible and use it wherever it creates leverage. But the more I do, the more confident I become in the broader direction.

The opportunity is not to build a business that competes with technology on its terms.

It is to build one around everything it cannot replace.

- Mike