The Reason AI Companies Are Opening Up Coffee Shops – CoffeeTalk

AI companies are increasingly opening up coffee shops to reach customers and differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace. One such example is Perplexity, a San Francisco-based AI company that recently opened a café in South Korea. Café Curious, located in the fancy Seoul neighborhood of Cheongdam-dong, features an AI DJ playing music, human baristas serving iced Americanos, and Perplexity-branded merchandise. The first hint of the café’s existence comes at checkout when guests are asked via touchscreen if they are Perplexity Pro subscribers. A “yes” earns them 50% off drinks, while a “no” triggers a QR code for a one-month free trial of the $20 service.

This trend is part of a growing trend among AI companies to use physical spaces to reach customers, with coffee as the lure. Anthropic and Notion have also added coffee pop-ups to their brand-building playbook, such as Microsoft’s “Coffee with Copilot” events, Modal AI partnering with Cometeer for branded giveaways, Ramp hosting coffee-cart popups, and Notion running “Cafe Notions” since 2022.

Perplexity’s goal with the Seoul café was to create something that could serve as a physical touchpoint between AI and everyday life. The company chose Seoul because of how technology and culture intersect, and the real point of the place seems to be to get people to try the AI service. The café wasn’t Perplexity’s first coffee push, either. Its Curiosity Café truck rolled through New York in June for that city’s Tech Week, offering free coffee to Perplexity users, and last year it launched a Perplexity-branded coffee bean line available at the company’s online merch store.

Brand strategists say the rush to tie AI to coffee is just another way to stand out in a crowded marketplace. AI companies are following the leads of beauty, fashion, and lifestyle brands that have turned to IRL activations to bond with consumers. Ashley Wong Tsui, CEO of Gemnote, which develops bespoke merchandise for major AI clients, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Perplexity, noted that IRL marketing can help humanize AI brands by applying analog marketing in an increasingly digital world.

Hints of Perplexity’s café ambitions surfaced in March during an interview with Henry Modisett, the company’s vice president of design. The café felt like a cute way to weave Perplexity into someone’s daily routine, inviting open-mindedness to be curious.

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