Meet the founder of a company that uses Zoom to take your order in NYC

Five restaurants, 12 cashiers, and one founder from Shanghai, China. Chi Zhang has been in the restaurant industry for nearly 10 years. In 2022, a restaurant he ran with friends shut down and they filed for bankruptcy. But like many entrepreneurs who hold tight to the idea of failing fast, that didn’t stop Zhang from trying again.

The following year, he founded Happy Cashier, which has gone viral on X due to the company’s unique approach to handling customers’ in-person food orders.

Zoom zoom. As customers enter the restaurant, one of those locations being Sansan Chicken in New York’s East Village, they’re met by a TV monitor screen. Using Zoom’s customizable avatar filters, a real person—over 8,000 miles away—is logged in to Zoom, ready to process food orders and answer customers’ questions about Japanese fried chicken.

IT Brew caught up with Zhang in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood to chat about his entrepreneurial journey, how he really feels about AI, and what he and his team learned after a recent Zoom meeting was compromised.

How did you even come up with this idea?

“I mean, in Japan, it’s a very common thing,” he said, adding that some reps overseas in the Philippines or Brazil will help customers in Japan check in at medical facilities. “Small-business owners realize this service can help to free up their time…with family.”

Zhang—who hails from a city known for its mouth-watering soup dumplings—explains that all of the cashiers at Happy Cashier are based in the Philippines and that he’d eventually like to include cashiers from Argentina, India, and Malaysia. The company’s mission is to “grow with small businesses, especially restaurant owners” and “help them survive in [an] error-computing world,” allowing them to have more time for important things, like sleep.

What happens if someone tries to hack the system? Is that a concern of yours at all?

“That is, actually,” he said. “And that happened two days ago.” One of the managers at a restaurant using Happy Cashier’s services left the Zoom password in a visible location, and a user was able to enter the meeting. “It’s a very elementary mistake,” he said. “We’ve tried to let our current and future customers know there’s certain rules you need to follow to protect yourself from those hackers.”

Do you ever see it becoming a point where you decide, “Well, we don’t necessarily need real people, and we’ll just use AI avatars”?

“I [could not] see that. So, as someone from the restaurant [industry], human interaction is number one. I owned fast-casual restaurants. So, I had 50 to 60 employees across my four restaurants, and I like working with human beings,” he said. “I don’t like AI, and I don’t see AI as something that can replace humans.” Zhang said he sees the company’s cashiers as “supplementary” and “not a replacement.”