A multi-hyphenate living in Dallas, Texas, Michael is founding CEO of Bailiwick Ventures, and founder of ARI venture Studio, a pioneering ResTech Startup Venture Studio that creates, finances, builds, and supports a growing portfolio of restaurant technology startups.

Michael is an accomplished investment banker with over 250 transactions and assignments spanning 30 years, a multi-brand restaurant operator and multi-unit chain CFO. ResTech investments in the ResTech Venture Studio can be seen here.

On the F&B side, Michael is co-founder, together with The Beach Boy's Mike Love, of Club Kokomo Spirits, a line of Ready-To- Drink Rum-based cocktails, Caribbean barrel-aged rum and the award-winning Seven Caves Distillery in San Diego, California.

As a advocate for transformative restaurant technologies, Michael advises restaurant brands, private equity funds and technology companies on matters relating to conversational AI and automation, system architecture, business intelligence, data models, restaurant technology, Tech-Stack design and digital transformation strategies. Michael is a frequent author of multle articles on restaurant AI, with over 60k resubscribers.

Most recently, and separate from ARI Venture Studios, Michael heads the development and investment in FohBoh.ai, via Basiliwick Ventures, Inc.

FohBoh.ai is the restaurant industry’s first multi-agent, multi-LLM, domain-specific Gen AI platform, tuned exclusively to the workflows, systems, and daily decisions of modern restaurant operators. Unlike generic LLMs, FohBoh integrates directly with POS, labor, inventory, and other systems of record and point solutions to interpret, and deliver real-time, role-specific actionable intelligence in natural language. It’s like having a data scientist, operations coach, and menu strategist in your pocket. It’s not just AI - it’s operational intelligence for restaurants, and its game changing for the multi-trillion-dollar foodservice industry.irst multi-agent, multi-LLM, domain-specific Gen AI platform, tuned exclusively to the workflows, systems, and daily decisions of modern restaurant operators.

Unlike generic LLMs, FohBoh integrates directly with POS, labor, inventory, and other systems of record and point solutions to interpret, and deliver real-time, role-specific actionable intelligence in natural language. It’s like having a data scientist, operations coach, and menu strategist in your pocket. It’s not just AI - it’s operational intelligence for restaurants, and its game changing for the multi-trillion-dollar foodservice industry. FohBoh.ai is expected to be publicly availble in Q3, 2025.

Public Speaking

Michael speaks about transformative technologies affecting the global restaurant industry and. Specifically, restaurant automation, voice technology, and the changing nature of customer engagement using integrated data and perscriptive and embedded analytics - modern data management systems.

Michael was recently named one of the restaurant industry's most influential restaurant technology experts by the Nations Restaurant News.

For information about ResTech, speaking or consulting, please contact Michael through this website or here.

See past speaking events below.

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