How Artefact is supporting the Burger King brand in deploying REBEKA, a conversational solution to accelerate data access for business teams.
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With nearly 600 restaurants, €2 billion in revenue, and 30,000 employees, Burger King is the second-largest fast-food chain in France. The brand is supported by 175 franchisees and backed by Groupe Bertrand, the leading French franchising catering group.
Groupe Bertrand, founded in 1997 by Olivier Bertrand, has held the exclusive operating rights for Burger King in France since 2013, the year marking the brand’s revival after a first venture in the 90s. The group is organized into two divisions: Bertrand Hospitality (prestigious brasseries like La Coupole, Lipp) and Bertrand Franchise (10 brands, including Burger King, Hippopotamus, Léon, Au Bureau, Volfoni).
Facing considerable data volumes and varied business needs, Burger King France partnered with Artefact to deploy REBEKA, a conversational chatbot that allows users to query transactional data using natural language, thus aiding business decision-making in restaurants and at the national level.
AI at the Heart of Burger King France’s Business Strategy
Burger King France already leverages AI across several strategic dimensions:
- Marketing: The brand measures the impact of its promotional operations to better manage its plan and accurately project sales and margin.
- Digital: Product recommendation models boost the average basket size via the mobile app (click & collect accounts for between 4 and 10% of sales, depending on the restaurant, thanks to personalized product suggestions).
- CRM: Segmentation via AI is used to better understand the Burger King customer base and improve communication targeting. The brand also uses algorithms to calculate the attrition rate (churn) to understand the risk of customer loss and attempt to retain them through relevant communications.
- Operations: LLMs (Large Language Models) analyze Google reviews to identify what is working well regarding both products and services, at the national and local levels.
- Analytics: Burger King France has deployed a generative AI chatbot that facilitates the analysis of transactional data with the REBEKA solution, co-built with Artefact.
Building a Reliable Data Foundation, a Prerequisite
“When you want to deploy AI at scale, you must ensure that the data made available to the models is reliable,” explains Florent Bernard, Managing Partner & Global Lead Travel, Tourism, Transportation at Artefact
To effectively deploy generative AI, Burger King France first consolidated its data infrastructure with the Snowflake solution, Artefact’s tech partner. This is a unified cloud data platform that facilitates secure, scalable, and real-time hosting, processing, and analysis of data.
The migration to this cloud allowed for the centralization of the entire data asset: transactions from all restaurants, CRM data hosted on Google Cloud Platform, product and restaurant repositories, supply chain data (inventory via APIs, stock outflows), and operational indicators (drive-thru service time, waiting time).
“This technology foundation really helped us gain a holistic view of all our data. It is very well referenced. We implemented many quality controls to ensure we collect clean and reliable data,” says Yves-Marie Devay, Business Intelligence Director at Bertrand Franchise (Burger King France).
Daily controls guarantee data quality and reliability. They allow for the quicker implementation of tracking dashboards. This database is enriched with new uses and channels emerging within Burger King restaurants.
Boosting the Performance of Traditional Analysis Tools with AI
To analyze data, Burger King teams use two types of tools:
- “Cubes” or “datasets” on Excel
- Microsoft Power BI reports
These tools structure the data by offering fine granularity per scope (sales, products, CRM) and cross-analysis of catalogs via Power BI. However, the acceleration of innovations and the continuous emergence of new uses reveal their limitations: by the time reports are published, new needs have often already emerged. This is where generative AI steps in, enabling faster and more precise decision-making at a specific moment based on even more complete and instantaneous analyses.
The Artefact Solution: A Chatbot that Makes Data Talk
Artefact supports Burger King France in developing REBEKA, a text-to-SQL conversational platform that allows data to be queried using natural language.
Generalized and Immediate Access to Data
REBEKA’s goal is to give all Burger King business teams direct access to databases, without requiring technical skills. Users, whether professionals in marketing, finance, HR, or supply chain, ask their questions in French. The chatbot translates these requests into SQL and returns the answers needed for decision-making.
The tool offers three advantages:
- Advanced Granularity: Ability to query data at the transactional level (product by product, receipt by receipt)
- Data Cross-Referencing: Combined analysis of sales, CRM, customer profiles, and performance
- Instantaneity: A few seconds are enough to get a status report, compared to several weeks with the old processes.
Rapid Adoption and Strengthened Data Culture
Beyond productivity gains, the teams at Burger King France aim for successful adoption of this new tool so that every employee, regardless of their job or technical level, can directly obtain the information relevant to their daily work. This vision aligns with Artefact’s philosophy: enabling the use and access to data and AI for the greatest number of people, using tools that address real business challenges and are actually used.
Next Steps: Towards Autonomous Analytical AI
Now that REBEKA is deployed, Burger King France is focusing on three areas for evolution:
- Horizontal Enrichment: Integrating even more data, such as Google customer reviews, delivery aggregator data crossed with restaurant performance, new channels, and uses. Each innovation brings its share of new data.
“Integrating an additional source into REBEKA is much simpler than deploying a new Power BI report,” concludes Yves-Marie Devay, Business Intelligence Director at Bertrand Franchise (Burger King France).
- Vertical Enrichment: Deployment to the Burger King France network and franchisees, ensuring ease of use and data confidentiality (a franchisee must not access data from other franchises).
- Increased Query Complexity: Going further so that REBEKA becomes an assistant capable of automatically diagnosing performance anomalies. Rather than answering specific questions, the chatbot will eventually be able to detect a degradation, launch the analysis to identify the causes, and return an explained summary.
This evolution towards autonomous analytical AI represents the next step: no longer just querying the data, but having it explain the underlying business phenomena.
