Plex Coffee was built around three promises: affordability, convenience, and a welcoming community. Drawing on inspiration from the tech industry, co-founders Philipp Cheng and Max Kamp ran the cafés with the mindset of a lean startup. “From recruitment to supply chain, every process that could be automated, was automated,” Cheng says.
But as Plex grew from one café to four, the founders faced new challenges that traditional automation couldn’t solve. ChatGPT Business was the natural solution.
Protecting the good vibes as Plex grows
Early hires were trained directly by the founders, but as more baristas and store managers came on board, it became harder to preserve a culture based on presence and personal attention to each guest.
“When Max and I started this, we were behind the counter ourselves. Every single new barista that we trained, we personally showed them how to engage with customers, how to make the different drinks, how to handle problems in the store,” Cheng says. “But then as we scaled, it was getting more difficult to embed that same culture in the new hires.”
As Plex expanded, two problems surfaced: fragmented knowledge sharing and inconsistent training. With part-time staff rotating shifts, routine questions exploded in WhatsApp groups: where to find certain items, details on a given process. “We were struggling increasingly with knowledge sharing and that resulted in a bombardment in WhatsApp…store managers were just drawn out of focus time,” Cheng explains.
Training also became harder to standardize. As the staff grew, store managers had less time to coach new hires on culture and customer experience. Cheng had tried distributing a 25-page handbook, but “nobody was really engaging with it.”
Solving knowledge sharing & onboarding with ChatGPT Business
Plex started by centralizing their knowledge in Notion, but they hit a wall. “Keyword search just doesn’t work that well, since everyone uses different words to describe what they’re looking for,” Cheng says.
The team enabled the Notion connector, which lets ChatGPT answer with context from your Notion files and wikis, so that the staff could simply ask for what they needed in natural language.
“That has cut down our WhatsApp messages on certain issues by over 50%, because people just know where to find stuff,” Cheng says. Staff use an in-store iPad to talk to ChatGPT. Reclaimed attention goes into what Plex values most: community engagement and events, which store managers now have time to run.
With ChatGPT Business, Cheng was able to leverage his 25-page handbook in a new way: “I uploaded this handbook into a custom GPT, which I share in our onboarding mail.” The GPT is prompted to teach core company values along with technical specifics like where Plex sources its coffee.
“Instead of just dumping information, it does it in an engaging manner in a conversation,” Cheng says. This means knowledge sticks better, and store managers no longer need to spend as much time coaching each new hire: “Onboarding time has gone from weeks to days.”
ChatGPT Business becomes a partner across operations
Once onboarding and knowledge sharing were running smoothly, Plex Coffee started experimenting with other ways to apply ChatGPT Business.
- Expansion research. As Plex grows, Cheng uses ChatGPT Business to evaluate new locations: “I use the deep research tools to make revenue potential estimations on customer volumes over time.”
- Understanding demand shifts. If there’s a particularly slow or strong day or week, “ChatGPT usually gives an amazing explanation, like how many students are leaving, or what events are happening that week. It is invaluable to understand demand patterns instantly and at a deeper level.” Cheng says.
- Automating supply orders. Placing orders with vendors takes time, because each one has different portals and workflows. To solve that, “we’re experimenting with ordering from our suppliers directly through Agent,” Cheng says. For a multi-city chain, this could reduce repetitive admin work and ensure stock is always in place.
Embedding AI in a brick-and-mortar business
For Cheng, adopting AI makes Plex Coffee more resilient and adaptable. “By integrating AI into our daily processes already now, we’re just more aware of the developments that are happening,” he says. “No matter what industry you’re in, there is a lot of value to be gained from that.”
With plans to expand to 10 cafés while keeping operations lean, Plex Coffee sees ChatGPT Business as an essential partner in scaling. But beyond pure efficiency, AI is creating space for the human side of hospitality to thrive—baristas spending time with guests, sharing good vibes, and keeping the café experience personal even as the company grows.
