How did your dinner make you feel?

Earlier this year, Yelp CPO Craig Saldanha shared his thoughts on Yelp's future in a world dominated by AI and LLMs.

One of Craig's quandary was combining the power of AI's summarisation with the wealth of user-generated content Yelp has gathered, without sacrificing the human-to-human feedback.

No easy feat.

Yelp's latest release is an attempt at combining the two to, hopefully, create something better.

How did this dinner make you feel?

Yelp's key new feature is a sentiment tracker that displays how users felt about their experience. The vibes, if you will.

This sentiment analysis tool (called Review Insights), "discern reviewer sentiment for common aspects of a business, such as the quality of its food, service, ambiance, wait time, and drinks."

The score is represented as a positive, critical, or neutral sentiment on a scale from 1 to 100 for each.

The power behind this tool is, of course, AI. Because Yelp can tap into LLM technology, they are able to report on the 'vibes' of a business even when user reviews don't necessarily mention things outright. For example, a review that says "Food was ok" will surely negatively impact the sentiment score, even though the user's feedback is not outright negative.

A tricky balance to strike

Yelp is one of many products that will need to cleverly reinvent itself.

For years, Yelp's power has been the human feedback they collect through their users' reviews. Other users come to Yelp because of this feedback, which creates a virtuous cycle of consumption and contribution.

While AI offers opportunities for summarisation, quick information access, and more, it will be important for Yelp to keep its human-first virtuous cycle going. If they lose the human touch, everything could crumble.