Denver-based hospitality business The Den Family Social has integrated ChatGPT Work into its administrative operations to accelerate licensing and grant applications as it prepares to open its second location. The adoption enables the small social club to drastically shorten multi-day regulatory workflows during its physical expansion, redirecting administrative hours toward club operations and customer-facing management.
According to metrics published by OpenAI on Oct. 1, 2026, the company’s leadership team saves 10 to 15 hours each week using the software. Document preparation for a second liquor-license application decreased 91 percent, dropping from four days of sorting, assembling, and formatting to three hours of review and completion. The accelerated turnaround allowed the team to meet a suddenly available hearing slot by identifying missing files and converting documents into required formats. Similarly, grant applications that previously required three days now take two hours, representing a 92 percent reduction in time.
Founder and Chief Executive Officer Chandler Lipe established The Den to combine hospitality, work, and community space for parents with environments where children are welcome. As construction and pre-opening tasks began for the second venue, the company linked ChatGPT Work with plugins for Gmail, Slack, and Google Drive to retrieve operational context from the first site. “ChatGPT Work allows us to build the company we need before we have the size or resources of that company,” Lipe stated, adding that using the tool to explore questions prior to group discussions eliminates roughly seven hours of exploratory meetings each week. The leadership team maintains final review of all generated outputs to verify factual accuracy.
The software has also been deployed across operational and partnership roles within the company. Brooke, The Den’s Head of Programming and Partnerships, supplied records of past partnership performance to develop a standardized proposal structure for executive review. For operations, General Manager Maia combined balance sheets and financial statements from the club’s accountant with point-of-sale inventory and sales data. Maia used the tool to synthesize that data into an organized overview to forecast inventory needs and coordinate purchasing between the existing and upcoming sites.
For mobile tasks, Lipe uses ChatGPT Voice during travel between locations to draft outgoing emails, dictate follow-up items from meetings, and structure project notes before returning to her desk. Several technological initiatives remain unbuilt, however. The Den still plans to evaluate OpenAI’s Codex model to build custom software, including a proprietary member application for check-in and class registration, cross-location Slack notifications, and direct technical integrations between its point-of-sale systems.