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 euros in revenue, and 30,000 employees, Burger King is the second-largest fast-food chain in France. The brand is operated by 175 franchisees and backed by Groupe Bertrand, France’s leading restaurant franchising group.
Founded in 1997 by Olivier Bertrand, Groupe Bertrand has held exclusive operating rights for Burger King in France since 2013, the year marking the brand’s revival after an initial foray 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, helping with business decision-making in restaurants and at the national level.
AI at the heart of Burger King France’s business strategy
Burger King France is already leveraging AI across several strategic dimensions:
- Marketing: The brand measures the impact of its promotional operations to better manage its plan and project sales and margin precisely.
- Digital: Product recommendation models boost the average transaction value via the mobile app (click & collect accounts for between 4 and 10% of sales, depending on the restaurant, thanks to personalized product suggestions).
- CRM: AI-powered segmentation is used to better understand Burger King’s customer base and more effectively target communications. The brand also uses algorithms to calculate churn rates in order to understand the risk of customer loss and attempt to retain customers through relevant communications.
- Operations: LLMs analyze Google reviews to identify what is working well, both in products and service, at 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 foundation of reliable data: A prerequisite
“When you want to deploy AI at scale, you need to be sure that the data made available to the models is reliable data,” explains Florent Bernard, Managing Partner & Global Lead Travel, Tourism, Transportation at Artefact
To deploy generative AI effectively, Burger King France first consolidated its data infrastructure with the Snowflake solution, a tech partner of Artefact. Snowflake is a unified cloud data platform that facilitates secure and scalable real-time hosting, processing, and data analysis.
The migration to this cloud platform enabled centralization of the entire data asset: transactions from all restaurants, CRM data hosted on Google Cloud Platform, product and restaurant reference data, supply chain data (inventories using APIs, stock outputs), and operational indicators (drive-thru service time, waiting time).
“This technological foundation really helped us to get a holistic view of all our data. It is very well referenced. We implemented many quality controls to ensure we are collecting 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 quicker setup of tracking dashboards. The database is enriched with new uses and channels emerging in Burger King restaurants.
Boosting traditional analysis tool performance 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 data by offering fine granularity by scope (sales, products, CRM) and cross-analysis of catalogs via Power BI.
However, the acceleration of innovation and the continuous emergence of new uses reveal their limits: by the time reports are published, new needs have often already emerged. This is where generative AI steps in, enabling faster and more refined decision-making at any given moment, based on even more comprehensive and instantaneous analyses.
The Artefact solution: A chatbot that makes data speak
Artefact is supporting Burger King France in the development of REBEKA, a conversational text-to-SQL platform that allows data querying using natural language.
Universal and immediate data access
The goal of REBEKA is to provide all Burger King departments with direct access to databases without requiring technical skills. Users, whether in marketing, finance, HR, or supply chain, pose their questions in French. The chatbot translates these requests into SQL and returns the necessary answers for decision-making.
The tool offers three key advantages:
- Enhanced granularity: Possibility to query data at the transactional level (product by product, ticket by ticket)
- Data cross-referencing: Combined analysis of sales, CRM, customer profiles, and performance
- Instantaneity: Only a few seconds are needed to obtain a status report, compared to several weeks with older processes.
Rapid adoption and enhanced 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: to enable the use of and access to data and AI for the greatest possible number of people, using tools that address real business challenges and are effectively utilized.
Next steps: Towards autonomous analytical AI
Now that REBEKA is deployed, Burger King France is focusing on three areas of evolution:
- Horizontal enrichment: Integrating even more data, such as Google customer reviews, delivery aggregator data cross-referenced with restaurant performance, and new channels and uses. Every 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 isolated questions, the chatbot will eventually be able to detect a degradation, launch an analysis to identify the causes, and provide an explanatory summary.
This shift towards autonomous analytical AI represents the next step: no longer just querying data, but having it explain the underlying business phenomena.
