Published October 21, 2025
Meet ROGER: The Restaurant AI Analyst Who Lives in Your Inbox
At Quantiiv, we’ve always believed that great analytics start with ownership.
Ownership of your data. Ownership of your insights. Ownership of the decisions that follow.
For most restaurant brands, “owning your data” has historically meant one thing: warehousing it. Pulling sales figures from your POS system, customer behavior from loyalty platforms, order patterns from delivery partners — all flowing into one clean, queryable home. That’s a big step forward. It means no more scattered spreadsheets, no more waiting on third parties to generate reports, no more wondering if the numbers you’re looking at are actually correct.
But as we worked with more operators, franchise groups, and emerging brands, we realized something important was missing.
Yes, getting all your data into one place is hard. Even with a warehouse, extracting meaningful insight requires knowing SQL, understanding data models, and having the technical chops to translate business questions into queries. Most operators don’t have that skill set — and shouldn’t need to.
But we realized the bigger challenge wasn’t even technical access — it was turning insight into action.
Even when brands could pull the data, even when they did have someone who could write the queries, those insights still got trapped. Buried in dashboards that only a few people logged into. Lost in static reports that were outdated by the time anyone read them. Disconnected from the actual conversations where decisions get made.
The real challenge wasn’t accessing data — it was making data accessible in the context of work, at the speed of business, without requiring anyone to become a data engineer first.
The Problem: Insights Hidden Behind Dashboards
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about most analytics platforms: they don’t get used as much as they should.
It’s not because they’re bad. Many are beautifully designed, with powerful visualizations and deep drill-down capabilities. But they all share the same fundamental flaw — they require people to go somewhere else to find answers.
Operators live in their inbox. Leadership lives in Slack threads and email chains. And the pace of work rarely slows down long enough for someone to say, “Let me log into the BI tool and pull that report.”
So what happens? Analytics get trapped behind dashboards that only a handful of people ever log into. The rest of the team makes decisions based on gut feel, outdated reports, or secondhand summaries that lose critical context in translation.
We kept hearing the same story:
- “We have the data, but nobody looks at it.”
- “By the time we pull a report, the moment has passed.”
- “I know the answer is in there somewhere, but I don’t have time to dig.”
The insight was there. The infrastructure was there. But the connection between question and answer was broken — not by bad technology, but by bad friction.
That’s when we started asking a different question entirely.
What If Your Data Warehouse Could Talk Back?
Most analytics workflows follow the same pattern: someone has a question, they open a dashboard, they filter and export and analyze, and eventually — if they’re lucky — they get an answer. It’s a pull model. The human does all the work.
But what if we flipped that?
What if, instead of going to your data, your data could come to you? What if asking a question felt less like running a SQL query and more like asking a colleague? What if your data warehouse wasn’t just a storage system, but an active participant in your workflow?
That’s the idea behind Roger.
The Answer: Meet Roger
Roger is your AI analyst — but he’s not another dashboard, and he’s definitely not another app you have to remember to open.
He’s an email-based AI that sits directly on top of your Quantiiv data warehouse. You can CC him on a thread, email him directly, or loop him into a conversation that’s already happening. And he’ll respond with live insights, trends, and performance summaries pulled straight from your data.
No dashboards. No logins. No waiting on reports.
Want to know how last week’s LTO performed across your top 10 locations? Email Roger.
Wondering if delivery orders are trending up or down compared to last month? CC Roger on the thread.
Need a quick read on which dayparts are underperforming? Roger has it.
He’s built with the same philosophy that guides everything we do at Quantiiv: your data stays yours.
Living Where Work Happens
We were extremely intentional about where Roger lives.
Not in a mobile app. Not in a web portal. Not in a SaaS platform that requires onboarding, training, and adoption.
In your inbox.
Why? Because that’s where collaboration already happens. That’s where your team is making decisions every single day. That’s where the GM is asking the regional director about comp trends. That’s where marketing is debating next month’s promotions. That’s where the CFO is questioning labor spend.
That’s where the work is.
By meeting teams where they already communicate, Roger turns data into part of the daily workflow — not a separate task on the to-do list. Whether you’re discussing next week’s promo strategy, reviewing a new menu item launch, or troubleshooting why one region is underperforming, Roger can join the conversation and provide clarity in real time.
You don’t have to change how you work. Roger adapts to you.
Why Email Unlocks Deeper Analysis
Here’s our favorite part about Roger.
Most AI chatbots and agents today are optimized for one thing: speed. They want to give you an answer in 2-3 seconds and move on. That works fine for simple lookups — “What were sales yesterday?” — but it completely misses the point of what an analyst actually does.
A real analyst doesn’t just answer your question. They ask the question after the question.
When you ask, “How did our new burger perform last week?” a chatbot gives you a number. An analyst digs deeper:
- How did it perform relative to the item it replaced?
- Which locations drove the strongest performance, and why?
- Was the mix skewed toward lunch or dinner?
- Did it cannibalize other menu items, or did it bring in net new sales?
- What does this tell us about our next menu innovation?
That kind of analysis takes time. It requires traversing multiple datasets, running comparison queries, identifying patterns, and synthesizing context. You can’t do that in three seconds.
That’s why we chose email.
Email freed us from expectations of latency. We don’t have to optimize for the fastest possible response — we can optimize for the richest possible insight. Roger can take 30 seconds, a minute, even two minutes if needed, to go deeper into your data and surface the analysis that actually matters.
Having Roger in your tech stack is like having your own personal analyst on staff — one who works 24/7, never takes a vacation, and has perfect recall of every transaction in your system.
Built by Someone Who’s Done the Job
This isn’t theoretical for us. Before Quantiiv, we spent years at Starbucks doing exactly this kind of work — sitting between the data and the business, translating questions into queries, and queries into actionable recommendations.
We know what it feels like to get pinged at 9 PM with “Hey, can you pull this by tomorrow morning?”
We know the mental model operators use when they ask about “performance” — they don’t just want revenue, they want context, comparison, and a recommendation.
We know that when a CMO asks about a promotion’s success, they’re really asking: Should we run this again? Should we tweak it? Should we kill it?
That domain expertise — those years of pattern recognition, those instincts about what question comes next — we’ve programmed into Roger’s knowledge traversal logic.
Most chatbots today are good at answering a question. But the analysis is where the value is. Nobody is asking the question after the question without a deep background working in this exact space.
Roger does.
When you email Roger, you’re not just getting a query result. You’re getting the kind of layered, contextual analysis that used to require a dedicated headcount — complete with the follow-up questions, the comparisons, and the “here’s what this means for your business” translation that turns data into decisions.
Built for Trust, Not Just Speed
One of the biggest concerns we heard during Roger’s development was trust. If an AI is going to tell you something about your business, you need to know it’s grounded in reality — not hallucinated, not approximated, not “good enough.”
Roger is fully transparent about where his answers come from. Every insight is grounded in your actual data. If he references a sales trend, he’ll tell you the time period, the locations, and the source tables. If he flags an anomaly, he’ll show you the comparison.
And here’s what really sets Roger apart: he attaches Excel spreadsheets to his email responses with the underlying data and cites his sources. You’re not just getting an answer — you’re getting the receipts. You can open the attachment, validate the numbers, run your own pivots, or share it with your team. You’re never left wondering, “Is this real, or is the AI making things up?”
This isn’t just about transparency — it’s about empowering your team to dig deeper when they need to. Roger gives you the executive summary, but he also gives you the raw materials to do your own analysis. It’s the best of both worlds: AI-powered insight with human-verifiable data.
And because Roger lives on top of your warehouse — not inside someone else’s infrastructure — you maintain complete control. You can audit his queries. You can see exactly what he accessed. You own the process, end to end.
Why It Matters
Roger represents a fundamental shift in how we think about restaurant analytics.
From static dashboards to living analytics. From pulling data to pushing insight. From siloed systems to true ownership.
The future of analytics isn’t about better visualizations. It’s about better integration. It’s about making data feel less like a separate task and more like a natural extension of how teams already communicate and collaborate.
And it’s about bringing the depth of human analysis to every question — not just the surface-level answer.
Roger is a small step toward that future — but it’s an important one.
What’s Next
We’re rolling out Roger to current Quantiiv customers, starting with early access partners who are helping us refine how he understands context, prioritizes insights, and communicates nuance.
We’re also exploring how Roger can evolve beyond email. Could he join Slack conversations? Could he proactively flag issues before you even ask? Could he learn your business well enough to anticipate the questions you didn’t know you needed to ask?
These are the kinds of possibilities that open up when you start with the right foundation: a data warehouse you actually own, structured in a way that makes sense for your business, and accessible through tools that meet you where you already work.
Roger isn’t here to replace your analysts or your dashboards. He’s here to make both more effective — by ensuring that the right insight reaches the right person at the right moment, with the depth and context that actually drives action.
The Bigger Vision
Ultimately, Roger is about something bigger than convenience.
He’s about democratizing access to insight — making it so that every operator, every franchise owner, every regional manager has the same ability to ask questions and get deep, analyst-level answers, regardless of their technical skill or proximity to the data team.
He’s about reducing the time between question and action — so that decisions get made faster, with more confidence, and grounded in reality rather than intuition.
And he’s about reinforcing ownership — reminding every brand we work with that this is your data, your infrastructure, your competitive advantage. We’re just helping you unlock it.
Roger lives on top of your warehouse, not inside someone else’s. He lives where your team already works. And he makes your data more human.
Ready to meet Roger? Reach out to learn more about how Quantiiv is bringing AI-powered analytics — with real analyst-level depth — directly into your workflow, without compromising ownership, security, or control.