The daily publication · November 11, 2026 · Restaurants

Duck Donuts runs its missing CFO job on an AI analyst it emails

By Tabron Merryhill · The Workflow

Duck Donuts has no chief financial officer. It has an inbox.

Five months ago Devon Mailey moved from CFO to CEO of the 130-unit franchise. The company did not hire a new finance chief. It built the job in pieces instead. An accounting specialist handles part of it. A tax contractor handles the year-end part. And an AI analyst named ROGER handles the questions in between.

ROGER comes from Quantiiv, a Columbus startup founded by former Starbucks pricing and analytics staff Patrick Daprile and Dhruv Nathwani. You do not open a dashboard to use it. You email it, like you would email a person on your team.

About seven months in, Mailey emails ROGER more than a dozen times a week. Her team emails it three or four times that often. Answers come back in seven to ten minutes, as reports and recommendations. ROGER now handles the weekly reports Mailey used to build by hand.

One answer changed how the chain talks to customers. ROGER flagged that people who order the sausage, egg and cheese sandwich come back more often than other customers. Duck Donuts changed its loyalty messaging around that one fact.

Quantiiv says it now works with more than 15 restaurant brands covering more than 600 locations.

The idea

A missing job does not have to stay missing, and it does not have to be filled by one person either.

Duck Donuts split the CFO job into the parts it actually needed. Numbers and filings went to specialists who do that work for a living. The everyday questions, the "what happened last week and why" questions, went to an analyst that never sleeps and answers by email.

That is the real shift here. The analyst job was not automated task by task. The whole function was rebuilt around an inbox, with a person still deciding what to do with each answer.

The example

Look at what had to happen before ROGER was worth emailing.

The first step for every Quantiiv client is handing over all of its data into one warehouse the bot can read. Sales, costs, and store data that used to sit in separate places had to be unified first. Weather and menu complexity get layered in after that.

Skip that step and the bot has a partial view. A partial view gives you fast answers built on half the business. That is worse than a slow answer built on all of it.

The sandwich finding only worked because the data underneath it was whole. ROGER could see who bought what and who came back, in one place. The insight was not magic. It was clean data, asked a plain question, by email.

There is a human cost in the story too. Mailey says some franchisees were a little afraid of the AI at first. They needed a nudge to make ROGER part of their routine. A tool nobody emails is not a team member, no matter what the vendor calls it.

The next step

If you have a role you cannot fill, do not start by shopping for a bot. Start with the data.

First, list the five questions you would ask that person every week. For a finance role, that might be sales by store, labor against sales, food cost, repeat customers, and cash in against cash out.

Second, check where each answer lives today. If the numbers sit in three systems that do not talk to each other, fix that first. Unify the data into one place a tool, or a new hire, can actually read. That work pays off either way.

Third, only then test an analyst tool on those five questions, for a month. Time the answers. Check them against numbers you already trust. Count how many you would act on without a second look.

And hear the other side clearly. Restaurant Dive reports tech leaders warning against AI overdependence. Popmenu CEO Brendan Sweeney said token costs can exceed the salaries the technology was meant to replace. Square's James Schonzeit said AI is limited by the data it can draw from, so a partial view produces worse decisions. Both warnings point the same way. The bot is not the hard part. The data underneath it, and the bill for running it, are.

Want help finding the one bottleneck in your operation worth fixing first? A free 10-minute workflow conversation will map where the hours go and who signs off before anything final. No pitch, just the map.

Sources: Restaurant Business, https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/technology/ex-starbucks-staffers-launch-ai-analyst-you-can-email; BusinessWire, https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260413492171/en/Quantiiv-Introduces-AI-Decision-Partner-That-Thinks-Like-a-Restaurant-Executive; Digital Transactions, https://www.digitaltransactions.net/quantiivs-virtual-executive-for-restaurants-popmenu-and-spoton-create-a-unified-commerce-platform/; Restaurant News, https://www.restaurantnews.com/quantiiv-ai-decision-partner-restaurant-executive-041326/. Opposing view: Restaurant Dive, https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/restaurant-technology-executives-warn-against-ai-overdependence/821024/.