Walking into a food court usually means scanning an available table or scanning the food stalls for your bah chor mee fix. Kopitiam’s new outlet at Mapletree Business City wants to make that process a little more helpful for diners, thanks to what it’s calling a first-of-its-kind interactive AI display screen at the entrance.
Meet “Kimberly”, a digital avatar stationed at the front. Instead of being just another static directory, Kimberly is designed to greet diners, answer questions, and point them towards their meal of choice. She speaks multiple languages – from English and Mandarin to Tamil, Japanese and surprise, surprise, even local dialects like Cantonese and Hokkien. Beyond directions, she can also suggest menu items, flag ongoing promotions, and even pull up a heat map of the food court to show areas of the food court where seats are available.
At a media preview at the outlet, I decided to put Kimberly to the test. The first thing that struck me was how quickly it responded – there was no awkward lag, almost instant even. Despite the area being noisy with the usual lunchtime chatter, it still picked up my voice clearly. I tried it in English first, and Kimberly immediately pulled up directions and a menu suggestion without fuss. Out of curiosity, I switched to Cantonese and told her I was recovering from a tummy upset, and to my surprise not only did it understand me with remarkable accuracy, but it also recommended soft food such as porridge.
The tech doesn’t stop at the entrance. Overhead, a large digital display near the entrance shifts between calming visuals – there were swaying trees when I visited. Hygiene and convenience are also a focus in a post-Covid era: cutlery now comes from UV-sterilised caddies, and automated touchless handwashing stations (that clean your hands with soap and then hand out paper towels) have been installed.
Hygiene and convenience are also a focus at the new Kopitiam’s newest outlet.
Behind the scenes, Kopitiam is also leaning on AI-powered video analytics. Cameras track footfall, manage queues, and monitor safety across the food court. The idea is not surveillance for its own sake, but to help staff be deployed where they’re needed – whether it’s clearing tables during peak hours or to ease a bottleneck in a queue. Kopitiam says stall owners also gain access to customer flow data, giving them a better sense of how to plan manpower or tweak service during busy periods.
At the end of the day, whether diners take to Kimberly as readily as they do kopi and bah chor mee remains to be seen, but the Kopitiam experiment at Mapletree Business City shows how food courts can evolve without losing their familiar charm. It’s a glimpse of what dining in Singapore might look like when tradition and technology share the same table.