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Quantiiv, an AI-powered data warehouse and analytics platform for restaurants, has launched what it calls a virtual executive that provides restaurant managers with management insights, reportedly without having to navigate dashboards across disparate applications.
The application, known as ROGER, provides an email-based interface that allows managers to send the app questions about the business and receive actionable insights in response. To formulate its responses, ROGER connects to a restaurant’s varied data sources, such as POS systems, inventory, and marketing apps. At the same time, the app pulls data from external sources to consider such factors as weather, holidays, and macroeconomic indicators to provide a point of view on data, much like a team of data analysts would, the company says.
As a result, Quantiiv says, restaurants can identify trends and detect anomalies to catch problems in their infancy and act before the problem worsens.
“Most AI tools can retrieve data, but they struggle to interpret it with the nuance required for real business decisions. ROGER was developed to do both,” Quantiiv co-founder Dhruv Nathwani. a veteran of the food and beverage industry, says by email. “Restaurant decisions are rarely straightforward, which makes understanding the nuance critical.”
Having deeper insights into data helps restaurant managers make “clear, data-driven decisions regarding the menu, pricing, customers and more, while adding technical skillsets such as structured query language or data science that might not exist in house,” Nathwani adds.
Structured query language is a standardized programming language used to manage, manipulate, and retrieve information from relational databases.
Quantiiv has already deployed its platform across brands representing more than 650 locations, including Duck Donuts, which operates more than 150 locations within and outside the United States. The donut chain has used Quantiiv’s platform to overhaul its menu and gain increased visibility into per-location economics. “What used to take days now happens in a conversation,” Duck Donuts chief executive Devon Mailey, says in a statement. “I email a question and get back not just an answer, but insights I would not have thought to ask for.”
Quantiiv says it plans to continue rolling out its platform to additional franchise-driven industries later this year.
“The restaurant business is tough, competition is fierce, and margins are thin,” Nathwani says. “Leveraging data to understand customers is critical as restaurants look to compete. ROGER provides decision clarity so that restaurants can thrive.”
In related news, restaurant-technology provider Popmenu Inc. has partnered with point-of-sale technology provider SpotOn Transact LLC to provide restaurants with a unified commerce platform to help drive growth. Popmenu‘s integration with SpotOn’s platform will enable restaurants to reduce operational friction and improve data flow between systems, the two companies say. As a result, they say, restaurants can capture more orders and streamline payments.
