As platforms and retailers like Walmart, Shopify, and Etsy sprint to integrate into LLMs, delivery and reservations companies like OpenTable and DoorDash are also taking note. But whereas SaaS platforms like Shopify aggregate the long tail of e-commerce merchants without taking a commission, there is no major first-party food delivery platform with a major AI partnership yet. Bites is a new startup that is building one of the first AI-native protocols for ordering directly from restaurants, integrating with the most common POS systems and payment processors to build a decentralized ordering network. Last week, I penned an op-ed about how AI agents will impact the future of restaurant ops and this week I sat down with Bites Co-Founder Bala Subramaniam to understand how AI will shape both the front-end and back-end of online ordering in the not-so-distant future.