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By Morgan Plant, Regional Vice President | LifeWorks Restaurant Group, part of Aramark’s Workplace Experience Group.
When I was thirteen years old, my parents sent me to work in a restaurant and it changed everything.
Both of them were college professors, and the idea was straightforward: get me into a real kitchen, let me see how much work and craft it took to feed people well, and spark something. It worked, just not in the way anyone expected.
What I found that summer and what I've spent the last 25 plus years building a career around, wasn't a stepping stone to something else. It was the thing itself: the instinct to make people feel genuinely cared for. To anticipate what someone needs before they know they need it. To create an experience so considered, so specific to the moment and the person, that it couldn't have happened anywhere else.
I was a valedictorian. I went to college. I got a biology degree from one of the best schools in the country. And then I went straight back to hospitality because nothing else came close to the feeling of getting it exactly right for someone.
The industry has changed. That instinct hasn't.
When I was coming up through hotels in the late '80s and early '90s, I'd walk into a conference room and count the women. At a gathering of 250 industry leaders, there might be four of us. Today, those same conferences run 70% women. The COO seat at major hotel and restaurant groups, once unthinkable for someone who looked like me is increasingly where you find us.
That's a real shift, and it's worth acknowledging. But what's more interesting to me is why hospitality has evolved this way. The industry has matured into something serious, multimillion dollar P&Ls, institutional investors, enterprise sales cycles. And it has also, at the same time, centered human experience as its core value proposition. Those two things turned out to go together. The executives who've risen are the ones who can hold both: the sharp analytical mind and the ability to translate that analysis into something a person actually feels when they walk through the door.
That balance, rigor and warmth, precision and care, is exactly what hospitality in the workplace demands right now. And it is what separates programs that perform from programs that simply function.
What AI actually changes — and what it doesn't
I want to be honest about something: I'm not a technologist. I have a biology degree I've never used and a complicated relationship with PowerPoint. When I was coming up, I had to teach myself Excel from scratch. I did it because I had to, not because I had any particular aptitude for it.
What AI does, at its best, is remove that tax. It frees people who have genuine hospitality instincts from having to spend their energy on operational complexity they could be doing with technology instead. A team member who has the natural ability to read a room, to notice that a guest is having a hard day, to make a small gesture that turns into a memory, that person shouldn't be spending their morning wrestling with spreadsheets.
That's the real promise here. Not that AI replaces the human work of hospitality. It's that AI clears the way for people to do the human work better.
Here's the thing I've learned that I believe more every year: you can't teach someone to care. You can train technique. You can coach communication. But that motivation, that genuine desire to make someone's day better is intrinsic. Great leaders find those people. They develop those people. They build organizations where that instinct gets to show up every single day.
AI doesn't change what we're looking for. It just changes the tools available to the people we find.
What this means for the workplace
The companies investing in elevated workplace dining right now aren't doing it because they ran the numbers on cafeteria utilization. They're doing it because they understand something fundamental: the workday shapes people. How someone feels at 10am affects how they think at 2pm. What they eat matters. Whether they feel seen in the place where they spend most of their waking hours matters enormously.
That's the premise at the heart of what we do at LifeWorks. Every program we build is designed from the ground up around a specific culture, a specific community, a specific set of people. Not templated. Not scaled down from something generic. Built with intention, for this client, for these employees, for this moment in how work is evolving.
That kind of program can't be replicated by a competitor who has better technology. It can only be delivered by people who genuinely care about getting it right and by an organization that has built its entire model around finding and fostering exactly those people.
The question worth asking
As workplace hospitality continues to evolve and as AI continues to reshape what's operationally possible, the organizations that win will be the ones who ask the right question. Not "what can we automate?" but "what can we make irreplaceable?"
My parents were wrong about restaurants. The work isn't a cautionary tale. It's a calling. And the future of that work belongs to the people who treat it that way.
About Morgan Plant
Morgan Plant is Regional Vice President at LifeWorks Restaurant Group, where she oversees the West Region. She has spent her career leading high performing teams in hospitality operations across hotels, dining, and workplace experience.
