It has now been five months since Devon Mailey was promoted from CFO to CEO of Duck Donuts, and the company has yet to hire her replacement in the finance department.
Instead, the 130-unit franchise has created a CFO in the aggregate, made up of an accounting specialist, a contractor to help out with year-end taxes, and ROGER, an AI bot developed by a startup called Quantiiv.
About seven months into this hybrid arrangement, ROGER has become a sort of data sage at the Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania-based chain. Mailey herself emails the bot more than a dozen times a week with questions ranging from basic reporting to in-depth analysis, and her team uses it three or four times that much.
“He’s literally replaced having a data analyst,” Mailey said in an interview.
Quantiiv was founded last year by Patrick Daprile and Dhruv Nathwani, who worked together at Starbucks HQ for a combined 10 years, Daprile on the pricing side and Nathwani on product management and analytics. Quantiiv is part of a growing class of tech companies aiming to use AI to help restaurants make decisions.
The founders’ experience in Starbucks’ intense, data-driven culture helped shape their idea for Quantiiv.
“We were in the trenches every day,” Daprile said. “It was like, Monday morning, 7:30 a.m.: If the business wasn't performing, we had to figure out why and what that means and how to communicate that story to our leaders.”
The pair had a front row seat to what Daprile called the “magic” of Starbucks’ go-to-market strategy—the process that has birthed category-defining products like Refreshers and the Pumpkin Spice Latte.
“We started Quantiiv to bring that to other restaurant brands,” he said.
The idea, in essence, is: What if every restaurant chain had a Starbucks-caliber analyst on the team? That’s what Quantiiv is hoping to deliver with ROGER. The name technically stands for Revenue Optimization for Growth and Expense Reduction, but it was inspired by a hard-working bartender at a dive bar in Daprile’s hometown.
For restaurants who opt to bring ROGER aboard, the first step is the least sexy, but also the most important. They hand over all of their data to Quantiiv, which compiles it into a warehouse that ROGER can draw from. (Restaurants still own the data.) The bot can also take into account outside factors such as weather and details that aren’t always captured by data, like how complex a given menu item is to prepare.
Once that’s set up, restaurants can start emailing ROGER at roger@quantiiv.com. They can ask anything that involves data, such as, “How are my milkshakes performing?” or “Should my restaurants be open on Sundays?”
ROGER will respond in seven to 10 minutes with an in-depth report, as well as recommendations for what to do next, just like a human analyst would, but faster. The bot is also designed to get better as it learns the nuances and culture particular to each client.
According to Nathwani, the beauty of ROGER is that it understands that most restaurant decisions are based in part on those nuances, rather than on hard data alone, and that in many cases, there is no clear answer.
“I would say about 75% of decisions fall into ‘yellow light’ status,” he said. “And [for] those, the answer is always, ‘It depends.’”
ROGER will lay everything out and make suggestions, but the answer won’t always be cut and dry. It won’t always say what the operator wants to hear, either.
“ROGER's not afraid to tell you that a product launch was bad,” Nathwani said.
For example, here's a portion of a demo email from ROGER about milkshake sales:
At Duck Donuts, leadership was looking for a tool that would make it easier for operators to work with their data because its existing system was fairly complex. When Mailey met with the Quantiiv team, she was hooked right away by both the technology and the founders’ knowledge of franchise operations.
She also liked the simplicity of the product. “Who doesn’t love sending a quick email to get a response?” she said.
ROGER has become a valuable sidekick for Mailey and her team. The bot now handles all of the weekly reports Mailey used to put together manually and sends them to her inbox at 9 a.m. every Monday. When she gets in the car to go visit a franchisee, ROGER is her second move after entering the store address in the Waze app.
“I send ROGER an email saying, ‘I'm going to visit this store. What are three things they're doing well? What are three things they should work on? And give me year to date sales analysis and product mix,’” she said. “By the time I get to my destination, I sit in the parking lot for five minutes and read over it before I go in.”
(When she goes inside, she said, she often finds that the operator has asked ROGER to pull the exact same data.)
The bot has also helped Duck Donuts answer deeper strategic questions, such as what rewards it should offer customers as part of its new loyalty program. This process resulted in a surprising discovery: Though the brand specializes in bright, eye-catching doughnuts, customers who order its sausage, egg and cheese sandwich tend to come back more frequently. Now, a lot of its messaging highlights both the sandwich and its doughnuts.
“That was something ROGER identified, and very early on, to be honest with you,” Mailey said.
For franchisees, ROGER has brought about a change of mindset. Many operators are used to running their business based on gut feeling. The company wants them to use ROGER to back their instincts with data. When a franchisee calls Mailey to talk about something, she often fires up ROGER in the background.
“So, while they're saying, ‘Well, I feel …’, I’m like, ‘OK, well, let's take the ‘feel’ out,’” she said. “Let's pull some data, and see what this is, and see what it's really telling us. And it just changes the conversation.”
Some franchisees who are “a little afraid of the AI” have needed a nudge to make ROGER part of their routine. But those who are using the system love it, Mailey said. “Internally, I don’t know what we would do without it.”
Quantiiv is far from the only tech company aiming to help restaurants interact with their data via an AI chatbot. A growing number of POS providers now offer similar tools. The founders say the difference is that ROGER was built around AI from the ground up, rather than “bolted on” to existing, non-AI software. And it’s designed to work with a complete set of data rather than isolated chunks from various apps.
“Our goal is to be very generalized, so that we could have all the context of the business, not just the marketing side or the finance side,” Daprile said. “We can go through and tie all of those data silos together, and then provide that one source of truth for our clients.”
Another differentiator is what Nathwani referred to as ROGER’s “ruthless” attitude, molded by the founders’ time at Starbucks, where every decision was examined under a microscope.
“[ROGER] has a pretty high bar for what's good and what's bad,” he said. “It helps challenge our users a little bit.”
Columbus, Ohio-based Quantiiv today has a team of more than 12 employees and works with more than 15 restaurant brands accounting for over 600 locations. Going forward, its goal is to keep making ROGER better, with a longer memory, more contextual awareness, and the ability to choose the right format for its messages.
“Sure, email is great, but so is a PowerPoint, right?” Nathwani said. “Those are things that you should come to expect from a pretty senior level analyst, if not someone close to more of a director level. And those are the things that ROGER’s gonna get better at.”