The AI Conversation Has Changed. Here’s Where It’s Going.

Earlier this month, the SF Tribune recognized me on their list of Bay Area women AI founders to watch in 2026. I am genuinely honored to be included, especially alongside founders like Fei-Fei Li, Daniela Amodei, Mira Murati, and Kanjun Qiu, women who are doing extraordinary work at the frontier of what AI can do.

It's an honor I don't take lightly. And it made me want to write down something I have been thinking about a lot lately.

We Are Past the "What Is AI" Question

A year ago, every room I walked into wanted to talk about whether AI was real. Whether it was ready. Whether it was safe to trust.

That conversation has quietly ended. The question now is a harder one: what does AI actually do when it has to work in the real world? Not in a lab or a demo. In a restaurant on a Friday night when it is slammed and something goes wrong.

The AI companies worth paying attention to right now are the ones who have figured out that general intelligence is not enough. The real breakthrough is not building something that can do everything. It is building something that deeply understands one world and shows up reliably inside it, every single time.

That is the direction the whole industry is moving. And it is exactly what we have been building at Palona.

What We Are Building Toward

When AI handles the routine, your team gets to focus on what only people can do: make guests feel genuinely welcomed, notice the table that needs something before they ask, and bring the kind of care to a shift that no software will ever replicate.

That is not just a philosophy for us. It is the standard we hold ourselves to every day.

Because building AI that actually earns that trust in a restaurant is harder than it looks. A restaurant is not a controlled environment. It is loud, fast, and unpredictable, and the consequences of a mistake are immediate. A wrong order is not a bug you fix next week. It is a guest who does not come back.

So we have been deliberate about getting the details right.

Our Voice AI is built to handle every call the way your best employee would. It knows your menu, remembers your regulars, and manages the rush without pulling anyone off the floor. And when a situation is genuinely beyond what it should handle, it knows that too, and gets a human involved before anything goes sideways.

Our Vision AI works through the cameras your restaurant already has. No new hardware, no new screens for your team to watch. It learns what your restaurant looks like when things are running well, and it flags when something is slipping, before a guest notices, before it becomes a complaint, before it costs you.

And we are connecting these pieces so they work together. Voice and Vision and Workflow, sharing information, so the system understands what is actually happening in your restaurant at any given moment and can act on it.

The version we are building toward is something closer to a great operations manager who never sleeps, never misses a shift, and is always paying attention. One who lets your team focus entirely on the guests in front of them, because everything else is already handled.

The Part That Keeps Me Going

I have spent my career building technology that is meant to make things better for the people using it. That has always been the measure that matters most to me.

In restaurants, that means something very specific. It means an operator who used to dread the dinner rush can walk into a full dining room and feel calm instead of overwhelmed. It means a team member who spent half their shift on the phone can spend that time on the floor instead. It means a guest who calls in gets a real answer, every time, even at 10pm on a Saturday.

That is the version of AI we are trying to build. Not the flashiest. Not the most talked about. The one that actually works, quietly, in the background, so the people running your restaurant can do what they got into this business to do in the first place.

We are not all the way there yet. But we are closer than we have ever been. And recognition like this is a good reminder of why the work matters.

If you want to see what it looks like inside your restaurant, we would love to show you. Book a call with our team to learn more.