This tech is the 'sad reality' of restaurant industry's future, business owner says robot works 12 hours a day

A restaurant in a rural Oregon city couldn't find enough servers to stay fully staffed. So the owner hired a robot named Plato. She had no idea how much pushback she'd get from the community. ESTACADA, Ore. – An Oregon restaurateur who sparked an uproar in her small town when she rented a robot to help her short-staffed servers said artificial intelligence is here to stay in the hospitality industry. "Plato works 12 hours a day," Sherry Andrus said of her new server, programmed to take plates of food from the kitchen to their destination table.