Last Updated: 4 July 2026
Musqet is a London company that builds payment and till technology for shops, pubs, and restaurants. It has announced a partnership with Merlin Griffiths, the bartender known to millions from Channel 4's dating show First Dates and the owner of The Dog & Gun pub in Walton, Leicestershire. Together they are building an AI sales avatar. This is a computer made character that uses Griffiths' face and voice to talk with possible customers in real time. Before it suggests any product, it asks how a venue actually runs.
Some plain wording helps here. An EPOS system, short for electronic point of sale, is the modern version of a cash register. It covers the till, the screens, and the software a business uses to take orders and handle payments. Musqet's founder and chief executive, David Parkinson, is leading the avatar project.
The plan responds to a common complaint in the trade. EPOS companies often sign a merchant up, then keep selling extra software features the venue never asked for. Small operators end up paying every month for tools they never use. The market behind this is growing quickly. The global pub EPOS sector was worth about $2.16 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach $3.91 billion by 2033, a yearly growth rate of 7.3%. As more venues replace old tills with internet based systems, the way those systems are sold starts to matter as much as the systems themselves.
"Hospitality operators are busy people running tight margins - they don't have time for a sales process built around a vendor's commission targets. What we've built with Merlin changes that. The avatar asks the right questions first, and only recommends outcomes that solve real problems for the merchant."
David Parkinson, Founder and CEO of Musqet
Hospitality is one of the biggest industries in the world, and it is changing. The global hospitality market was worth an estimated $5.52 trillion in 2025 and is expected to reach $5.82 trillion in 2026. Across that market, operators are turning to artificial intelligence to personalise service, cut costs, and run daily work more smoothly. The reason is simple. There are rarely enough hours or enough staff to cover everything, and answering the same questions over and over eats into the day.
An AI avatar is one response to that problem. In plain terms, it is a computer made character with a face and a voice that can hold a conversation, rather than a text only chatbot. Software does not sleep or take breaks. So an avatar can reply at any hour, keep its answers steady, and move between languages without new hires. Musqet's version is built to work around the clock in more than 30 languages. Similar tools already appear in shops, banks, and hotels, where they greet people and help them find what they need.
For a small operator, the value is a first point of contact that is always on and does not push products to earn a commission. The stage of the work is worth stating plainly. Musqet and Griffiths recorded his speech patterns and facial movements in a studio to make what the company calls a high fidelity prototype, which means an early but polished working model rather than a finished product on sale today. If it works as planned, the result is a sales talk that begins with the merchant's situation instead of a fixed product list.
Musqet Limited is registered in England and Wales and based in the City of London. It describes itself as a payments and EPOS company that offers a full set of payment options, including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Google Pay, and Apple Pay. It gives particular attention to Bitcoin, treating it as a way to pay rather than only as an investment. Its products cover online payments, in store card machines, EPOS for hospitality and retail, currency conversion, and Bitcoin payments. It works as an Independent Sales Organisation alongside regulated acquiring partners, the firms licensed to process card payments.
The Bitcoin angle also explains how this partnership started. Griffiths supports Bitcoin, and Parkinson noticed him wearing a Bitcoin t-shirt during an appearance on ITV's Saturday Kitchen. He reached out, the two found common ground, and the avatar idea followed. The announcement caps a busy stretch for the company. Musqet recently presented at Money20/20 Amsterdam, a large payments industry event, alongside Vodafone IoT. It also launched an agentic commerce protocol on Google's Universal Commerce Protocol. Agentic commerce means letting AI software carry out purchases on a person's behalf, a young field that big technology firms are now trying to set common rules for.
Griffiths brings two things to the project. He has public recognition from a decade on television, and he has run a pub himself, so he knows the daily reality. The company argues this makes owners more willing to say what they actually need.
"Anyone who's actually run a venue knows what it's like to sit through an EPOS pitch and come out the other side with a monthly bill full of things you never asked for. I've been there. The reason I got involved with Musqet is because this is genuinely different - it starts with your operation, not with a product catalogue. If this saves one publican from a contract they regret, it's worth it."
