"Five years ago, my challenge was to convince people that we could do amazing things with AI. Now, my challenge is not to say no to everyone. We need to work on everything but AI before we can create value with AI."
That is Sophie Buresi, 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 the group into a brand-new role with a two-part mandate: use AI to improve EBITDA, and keep HQ lean as the group grows. This episode of What's Cooking is her playbook on what the Head of AI job actually looks like today — and it is almost never what people assume.
In this conversation with Conor Sheridan, Sophie walks through why the biggest unlock is almost never AI itself (it is technical harmonisation and data foundations), how she decides which AI use cases to invest in across six brands and multiple geographies, drive-through voice ordering as the worked example of a use case that is live in Belgium and the Netherlands and deliberately paused in Italy, how she sells a use case to a franchisee who owns their own P&L and expects payback in months not years, why hardware-heavy deployments like kiosks and scales are owned by the operations team rather than Group AI, and the two parallel HQ efficiency streams she is running: AI for All for individual LLM-driven efficiency, and process transformation for department-level change.
Plus a quick-fire round on the Monday morning metric she looks at first, the AI category in QSR she thinks is overrated today, build vs buy at QSRP, and the one piece of advice she would give a CTO handed a brand-new AI mandate.
If you are running an AI agenda inside a multi-brand or multi-market business, or you have been handed an AI mandate without the data foundations to deliver on it, this is the hour.
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