What's Cooking? | A Podcast from Nory

"Five years ago, my challenge was to convince people AI could do amazing things. Now, my challenge is not to say no to everyone." Sophie Buresi is Group Head of AI at QSRP, the Zug-based quick-service restaurant platform that operates Burger King, Quick, O'Tacos, Nordsee, Dunkin and Chopstix across roughly 1,300 restaurants in multiple European markets. She joined into a brand-new role with a two-part mandate: use AI to improve EBITDA, and keep HQ lean as the group grows. In this conversation with Conor Sheridan she walks through what the real job of a Head of AI actually looks like today. Why the biggest unlock is almost never AI itself (it's technical harmonisation and data foundations). How she decides which AI use cases to invest in across six brands and multiple geographies, using drive-through voice ordering as the worked example (live in Belgium and the Netherlands, deliberately paused in Italy because the unit economics don't work there). How she sells a use case to a franchisee who owns their own P&L, with payback measured in months not years. Why hardware-heavy deployments (kiosks, scales) are owned by the ops team, not Group AI. The two parallel HQ efficiency streams she's running: AI for All for individual efficiency, and process transformation for department-level change. Plus a quick-fire round on the Monday-morning metric Sophie actually looks at first, the AI category she thinks is overrated in QSR today, build vs buy, and the one piece of advice she'd give a CTO handed a brand-new AI mandate. KEY TAKEAWAYS The business case is local. Value per lane moves with the brand, the market and the store. You have to price AI use cases market by market, and keep measuring after launch — the use case that pays today can stop paying tomorrow, and you need to be ready to switch it off. The operator decides, always. Pilot in company-owned restaurants, pick franchisee lookalike locations (not just flagship city centres), and show payback in months not years. If a use case adds complexity, restaurant teams won't use it. The usage data will tell you straight away. AI is the cherry on the cake. The real work is harmonising systems, centralising data and fixing processes. Most of what it takes to deploy an AI use case is actually simplifying a process, not adding an agent. The Head of AI job has flipped. Five years ago it was convincing people AI could do amazing things. Today it is saying no to everyone until the data foundations, architecture and processes are in place that actually let AI pay. Operators have to be at the table from day one. Restaurant managers and district managers spot the operational blockers that no pilot framework will. Group AI designs the use case with local ops, not for them. USEFUL LINKS & RESOURCES Sophie Buresi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophieburesigallay/ CONNECT WITH THE SHOW All What's Cooking episodes: https://www.nory.ai/podcasts Nory: https://www.nory.ai/ Nory blog: https://www.nory.ai/blog Nory on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/asknory/ Conor Sheridan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheridanconor/

Missed the full episode with Matt Rodbard, Editor in Chief of TASTE? Here's the bite-size cut. Keep an eye out for our next episode, featuring Sophie Buresi, Group Head of AI at QSRP. Hosted by Conor Sheridan, CEO of Nory, the AI operating system for hospitality. LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/you-can-still-open-matt-rodbard-on-what-new-york-operators/id1825066598?i=1000793826758 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/03hX1DEofrWsEeuczOHFfD?si=MTwJhk0ySLy6jT-QBcbG1g YouTube: https://youtu.be/j-KkFn8cOnI CONNECT Matt Rodbard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattrodbard/ Conor Sheridan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheridanconor/ Nory: https://www.nory.ai/ All What's Cooking episodes: https://www.nory.ai/podcasts

"You can still open in New York." Matt Rodbard, founding Editor in Chief of TASTE, on what operators get wrong when they try. Conor sets up this episode on the three-times cost of entry in New York — the number that decides who is allowed to try at all. Matt's reply reframes the hour in his first line: "You can still open in New York. So I hope that's like a headline from it." The rest of the conversation holds that tension. The opex is real (over $100 per square foot in Manhattan, $70 wage plus payroll taxes), and NY menus have become more uniform because of it (seared fish, steaks, roast chicken, whole fish). London is quietly where more creativity is happening right now because the opex is lower. Chicago is the overlooked US city (great restaurants in black-box spaces at roughly a tenth of NY rent). Hawksmoor, Gymkhana and Carbone Las Vegas now land in a way they wouldn't have ten years ago. The "hotshots" who get this wrong fail because they don't ingratiate themselves to the community. Restaurant books are either a serious brand builder or "the most expensive business card you'll ever produce." Payroll tax reform (Camilla Marcus's proposal) is the single intervention that would most help NY operators. And restaurants functioning as third spaces is a public-safety issue, not a nice-to-have. Plus a Quick Turn (where to open right now: LA, London, NY in that order; the belief about the industry he's changed in the last five years; the best-run NY restaurants he's eaten in recently; his favourite food city globally), a flag on Eye Level, the new TASTE podcast on grocery and CPG, and a closing flip where Matt turns the mic on Conor's chicken-sandwich reputation. KEY TAKEAWAYS "You can still open in New York." The three-times cost of entry is real, but Matt's headline is that it is still possible — and the operator-facing question is what you do, not whether you try. London is quietly where more creativity is happening right now, because the opex is lower. NY menus have become more uniform (seared fish, steaks, roast chicken) as a direct consequence of what the city costs to operate in. Chicago is the overlooked US food city. Great restaurants in black-box spaces at roughly a tenth of NY rent, James Beard winners, a supportive dining community, and under the radar for most operators. "Hotshots" fail when they open in a new city without ingratiating themselves to the community. Great press and great food is not enough. Payroll tax reform is the single intervention that would most help New York restaurants (Camilla Marcus's proposal: rebate two thirds of the payroll tax back to the restaurant to reinvest in PTO and staff benefits). The civic case is that restaurants = third spaces, and third spaces = public safety. USEFUL LINKS & RESOURCES Matt Rodbard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattrodbard/ Matt Rodbard on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattrodbard/ TASTE: https://tastecooking.com Matt's author page on TASTE: https://tastecooking.com/author/mrodbard/ The TASTE Podcast: https://tastecooking.com/category/the-taste-podcast/ CONNECT WITH THE SHOW All What's Cooking episodes: https://www.nory.ai/podcasts Nory: https://www.nory.ai/ Nory blog: https://www.nory.ai/blog Nory on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/asknory/ Conor Sheridan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheridanconor/

Missed the full episode with Topher Bertone-Ledford, VP of Operations at Emmy Squared Pizza? Here's the bite-size cut. Keep an eye out for our next episode of What's Cooking, hosted by Conor Sheridan, CEO of Nory, the AI operating system for hospitality. LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/be/podcast/how-to-rebuild-a-struggling-restaurant-region-with/id1825066598?i=1000784508559&l=nl Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/18MabMxvjNe0CS2lkLkyV1 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYcdNaALdhg CONNECT Topher Bertone-Ledford on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/topherbertoneledford Conor Sheridan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheridanconor/ Nory: https://www.nory.ai/ All What's Cooking episodes: https://www.nory.ai/podcasts

There's a split happening across hospitality right now that doesn't get talked about enough. Restaurant groups that opened after Covid built their operations for a world we're actually in: leaner teams, faster decisions, tighter margins, all from day one. Groups that existed before Covid and survived it are often still running on assumptions from a different era. Surviving the pandemic and surviving what came after are two very different problems. Topher Bertone-Ledford, VP of Operations at Emmy Squared Pizza, has spent the last two years living inside exactly that gap. He took over the group's New York region in a challenging state and rebuilt it from the ground up. Today, New York is the group's top-performing region on profitability. In this conversation with Conor, Topher walks through the operational reality of a post-Covid rebuild: why the middle of hospitality has disappeared, why "cleanliness is respect" is the foundation of everything, the labour acquisition speed problem no one has solved yet, the 12 Steps of Service campaign Emmy Squared rolled out in a three-month sprint, and the total-experience math the guest is actually doing at the end of every meal. Plus a frank closing take: the hospitality industry needs to stop pretending it's like any other industry. KEY TAKEAWAYS - The middle of hospitality has disappeared. Fast casual has streamlined; fine dining has doubled down on opulence. The mom-and-pop with linens and a $35 pork chop no longer works. Operators have to run to the edges to be successful. - Cleanliness is the foundation, not a nice-to-have. Topher's Emmy Squared turnaround started with one question walked through every restaurant: "Are we seeing the same restaurant?" Leaders who couldn't moved on. - Labour acquisition is a speed problem, not a salary problem. The talent pool has shifted post-Covid. The operators who move fastest on decisions and communicate vision fastest win the "diamonds in the rough." - Data has to be real-time to be useful. Running the business off a two-week-old P&L means being two weeks behind the bell curve. - Guest experience is total math, not dish math. The guest never knows the numbers. They do a split-second equation at the end: does this total match the experience I just had?