Craftable CEO David Cantu on why hotel F&B gets the most from AI when purchasing, inventory and labor run on one platform.

Hotel Management's October issue looks at how hotel food and beverage leaders are putting AI and automation to work, and Craftable CEO David Cantu was one of the operators and technology leaders the magazine spoke with. The common thread across the interviews: AI earns its place when it hands time back to the people running the outlets, not when it adds another dashboard to check.

Here's what David shared, and what it means for hotel F&B teams weighing their next move.

The blind spot is bigger than food cost

Chefs and bartenders work on thin margins with no tool telling them the right quantity to order or prep, so they play it safe and waste builds up. But David points out that food is only the most visible piece. Paper goods, cleaning supplies and utilities carry the same blind spot across a hotel, and most of that waste is never measured.

"GMs cannot fix what they're not tracking." — David Cantu, CEO, Craftable

A fully digitized back office changes the order of operations. Instead of finding a problem when it lands on the P&L, a manager sees it early enough to act, and can go straight to the highest-impact opportunities across food cost, labor and purchasing.

Why a generic AI tool disappoints

Many hotel restaurant GMs expect AI to fix everything at once. When they plug in a general-purpose model that was never shaped around their business, the results fall flat.

That's why David's first conversation with a prospective operator is about what AI can and can't do, and which problems are worth solving first. Purchasing, invoicing, inventory, recipe costing and labor planning all decide profitability, and in most hotels they're still largely manual or split across systems that don't talk to each other. Connect them on one platform and a change in food cost flows into recipe pricing, and a shift in demand flows into the labor plan, without a manager connecting the dots by hand.

Six days of inventory close, down to one

Hôtel Swexan in Dallas, a Michelin Key-recognized property, runs multiple restaurants, a full banquet operation and thousands of SKUs. Before Craftable, operations was buried in paperwork, finance struggled to keep up with invoices, and culinary relied on outdated tracking. Month-end inventory close took nearly a week.

Today Hôtel Swexan runs six outlets on one platform and closes inventory in one day instead of six, so leadership sees accurate cost data while there's still time to act on it.

Operators across the industry see the same pattern

The article also features F&B leaders at Kohler, Concord Hospitality, The Brookstreet Hotel and two San Antonio Marriott properties. Their tools differ, but their conclusions line up: AI is most useful when it takes over data gathering and reporting, so chefs, bartenders and managers spend more of their shift with guests and their teams. Each of them framed it as an assistant for their people, not a replacement.

Tenure is the number that matters

For David, the payoff goes beyond cost control. When a system gives GMs their time back and forecasts they can trust, it removes much of the burnout that drives good people out of hospitality.

"Tenure is the money ball metric of year-over-year performance." — David Cantu, CEO, Craftable

Long-tenured GMs keep teams together and guests coming back, whatever the brand or service model. Asking your best operators to fight disconnected systems every day costs more than efficiency. It costs you the people.

What comes next

David expects the next step to be agentic: systems that don't just surface an insight but start the workflow, such as adjusting an order, flagging a staffing gap or recommending a menu change for a manager to approve. Forecasting is getting sharper too, pulling in weather, local events and holidays alongside last year's sales, and feeding straight into ordering, prep and staffing rather than sitting in a separate report.

Read the full article in Hotel Management →

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This article & interview was originally published by Hotel Management magazine.
About Craftable

Craftable is the single back office for restaurant and hospitality operators, unifying invoices, inventory, ordering, and daily profit-and-loss visibility in one system. Operators use Craftable to control food and beverage costs, automate accounts payable, and act on their numbers the same day — not at the end of the month.

Craftable serves hospitality groups including bartaco, Hôtel Swexan, TC Restaurant Group, Woods Coffee, and José Andrés Group.