An AI agent booked my table. Out-of-date dog guides nearly stopped it.
I asked an AI assistant to book my local for two people and a dog. It found the slot in minutes, then stalled on dog rules from old guides. Here is what a pub has to fix so agents can say yes.
Five weeks ago I wrote here that AI agents booking pub tables was something to understand, not a project to start. Revisit it in six months, I said. It took five weeks, and it happened to me.
On Wednesday 7 October I texted Instinct, an AI assistant I message like a person, and asked it to book my local for a table for two, the following Wednesday at 7.30pm. I told it we would have our dog Toby with us, and I asked for a booth if they had one.
It found the 7.30 slot straight away. Then it stopped.
Where it got stuck
The pub’s online booking only offered restaurant tables. The bar was not an option. And the only dog rule it could find said bar or outside only, from information dated 2018. It did not want to book me a table the dog could not sit at.
So it gave me the pub’s phone number and suggested I ring. It cannot make phone calls itself.
I did not need to ring, because I know the place. Dogs are welcome in the bar, and there are three dog-friendly booths. I told it that. It booked a restaurant table with a note asking for one of the booths, and the booking went in. Six minutes from my first text to the confirmation. Its last word on it was that the note was “a request not a guarantee, so worth a mention when you arrive.”
That evening I opened the booking link to check it and got a login page with a red warning banner. I thought the booking had failed. It had not. The page just wanted my surname. I am all booked in.
A stranger would have been handed a phone number
The agent did its job well. It refused to guess about the dog and asked me. It still nearly gave up, because the information out there could not answer three simple questions. Can I bring my dog? Can I sit in the bar? Can I have a booth?
I could answer them because it is my local. A visitor could not. Their agent hands them a phone number and a job to do. The place down the road, whose information says yes, has a good chance of getting the booking instead.
Agents believe what they can find
So I went looking for where the wrong answer came from. There are two dog guides. One is out of date. The other, a tourism website’s dog guide, is worse: it says dogs are not allowed in the downstairs bar at all. When we asked an AI search tool the same question, that guide was the first thing it pulled up. Our schema says the pub is dog-friendly. Its booking system still needs work so an AI agent can make a clear decision.
You would be amazed what an AI treats as an authority. A pub can have good structured data and a clear website, and still lose the argument to a dog guide on someone else’s site.
I contacted both guides, by email and through their online forms, with the right information.
That is the lesson. Getting your own website and listings right is half the job. The other half is finding the conflicting signals elsewhere and closing them down when you can.
This is months away, not years
People are already using agents to shop online, book hotels and book tables in pubs and restaurants. I am one of them. Instinct is one of a growing crowd of assistants you just text, and they are only the start. My view is that agentic shopping becomes normal in a time we will measure in months, not years. The early adopters are doing it now.
When an agent cannot get a clear answer, it hands the job back to the customer or books somewhere it can. Either way your pub drops out of the mix.
What leaders should do next
- Ask an AI assistant to book a table at one of your pubs with a dog, a child or a wheelchair user in the party. Watch where it gets stuck, before your customers find out for you.
- Publish the answers to the questions people actually ask on your own site and listings, in plain words with a date on them: dogs, which areas, booths, children, step-free access. Mark them up so machines can read them too.
- Ask your booking supplier whether a customer, or their agent, can book the bar, the garden or a dog-friendly table, as well as “restaurant”. A free-text note is not an answer an agent can rely on.
- Search for your pubs in the tourism guides, council pages and old listings that agents read, and get the wrong ones corrected. Every conflicting source is a reason for an agent to go elsewhere.