Everything was going well for innovative entrepreneur and restaurateur Haruki Odajima — or so it seemed until the coronavirus pandemic swirled across the country earlier this year.
His artificial intelligence business, Ebilab, which helps restaurants predict how many customers they will get with more than 95 percent accuracy, was flourishing. That success was driven by his long-established restaurant Ebiya in Ise, Mie Prefecture. He had been using the Japanese restaurant to demonstrate how his system can more than triple productivity, grow profits fivefold and reduce food waste by more than 70 percent.
Then came the coronavirus. With businesses asked to close and people told to stay in, the restaurant industry has chalked up unprecedented losses as bankruptcies sweep the country. And Ebilab’s invention, which uses over 100 different data sets to project customers up to 45 days in advance, was no panacea.