How Papa Johns Uses DataGPT to Scale Insight, Reduce Reporting Overhead, and Act Faster!

Papa Johns is one of the world’s most recognized QSR brands, with performance driven by a complex mix of digital campaigns, regional operations, franchise dynamics, and evolving consumer behavior across platforms. While the company had robust data systems and reporting processes in place, making sense of that data quickly – and at scale – was an incredible challenge and opportunity.

Different teams needed different views. Reporting expectations were growing. And the speed of decision-making across e-commerce, store ops, and marketing left little room for delays.

That’s where DataGPT came in.This project was a close collaboration between Papa Johns UK, Sleeping Giant Media, and DataGPT. As Papa Johns' UK analytics partner, Sleeping Giant Media played a valuable role in identifying operational pain points, context around the sophisticated set up and helping translate strategic business needs into practical, AI-powered solutions. This close collaboration between the parties helped to bridge strategic needs with technical execution and ensured the outcome was deeply aligned with the real-world challenges and opportunities facing Papa Johns.

The Challenge: Faster Answers and Fewer Bottlenecks Across the Business

Papa Johns wasn’t struggling to access data, they were seeking a smarter, more accessible way to interact with it, with the goal of empowering teams and accelerating data maturity across the organization.

Teams across the business wanted to ask deeper questions about store performance, channel and spend performance, customer behavior, product mix, and promotional lift – without waiting on a backlog of dashboard requests or ad hoc analysis. They wanted to reduce the manual effort involved in recurring reporting, and they needed to make insights more consistent and accessible across teams.

The key challenges included:

• Making sense of fluctuations in metrics like conversion, revenue, spend, store, and basket size across stores, platforms, channels, and hours of day
• Identifying underperformance across specific regions, store types (franchise vs corporate), or customer segments
• Reducing the time analysts spent building weekly and daily reports
• Delivering insight in a format that was both understandable and actionable across marketing, ecommerce, and field operations

The Solution: Natural Language Access + Automated Insight Delivery

DataGPT was integrated into Papa Johns’ UK data environment to do two things:

1. Allow anyone to explore data through natural language Instead of navigating filters or assembling dashboards, business users could ask direct questions and get structured, analysis-ready answers in seconds.

For example:

• Why did revenue drop in the Northern region on Friday night?
• How did average basket value change across corporate stores last week?
• Which deals performed best in the mobile app over the last three weekends?

Under the hood, DataGPT runs key driver analysis, compares across dimensions like session channel, store type, and city, and explains anomalies using contextual logic, all presented in natural language.

2. Automate recurring reports with built-in intelligence Performance teams set up automated delivery of key reports, including:

• Daily summaries showing regional trends in revenue, conversion, basket size, and store-level outliers
• Weekly, Yearly and YTD trends reports by deals, platform, item categories, channels and more.
• Alerts when a store, region, or platform metric moves beyond its typical range

Comprehensive reports are delivered directly via email. There’s no need to log into BI tools or spend time formatting slides before executive reviews. And unlike static dashboards, these reports explain what’s changing and why.

“With DataGPT, we finally have a more complete view of our retail data across web and app, giving us a clear view of customer journeys, purchase behaviors, and product performance, all in one place.”

Mia Chen, International Commercial Analyst - Papa Johns

Use Cases in Action

Here are four examples. among many others that capture the essence of how Papa Johns teams use DataGPT in practice. Together, they reflect the platform’s ability to streamline analysis, surface what matters, and help teams take action faster:

1. Weekly and YTD Performance Summaries Teams get clear comparisons of key business metrics across weeks and years, with built-in context and percentage changes - no manual formatting or interpretation needed.

2. Segment-Level Breakdowns Users quickly explore performance across different stores, platforms, and audience segments, identifying top performers and areas that need attention without relying on static dashboards.

3. Product and Deal Insights Category teams analyze which combinations of products, deals, or offers are driving the highest value, helping them focus on what’s working and optimize what’s not.

4. Behavior Trends and Anomaly Detection Whether it’s shifts in user behavior, unexpected drops in performance, or outliers worth investigating, DataGPT flags what matters and explains why before it impacts business results.

“We set out to use AI to improve the analysis of our data as well as support a conversational interface. DataGPT easily surpassed other enterprise solutions and their onboarding and support has been fantastic”

David Rose, Senior Director, International Digital and Marketing Technology

“Working with the DataGPT team has been a truly collaborative experience. Their openness to feedback and agility in adapting the product to meet Papa Johns’ specific needs has been exceptional. From adjusting logic behind anomaly detection to fine-tuning how deal insights are surfaced, the team has shown a real commitment to iterating quickly and getting things right. It’s been a pleasure to partner with a team that moves fast, listens actively, and consistently drives forward innovation that matters.”

— Chris Hirlemann, Director of Data & Insight, Sleeping Giant Media

The Impact

DataGPT reduced time spent on manual reporting, improved consistency in how trends are analyzed, and gave more teams direct access to real-time performance data. Issues are identified faster, decisions are made sooner, and teams across functions now rely on the same, explainable source of truth daily. In fact, It’s now a standard part of weekly executive meetings, with insights from DataGPT reviewed ahead of time to align on key metrics and changes. The success of this collaboration in the UK has also helped pave the way for onboarding Papa Johns US, expanding the scope of impact and reinforcing the global potential of conversational analytics at scale.

About Papa Johns

Papa Johns operates over 5,500 restaurants in more than 45 countries, and over 450 in the UK. Founded in 1984, the company is known for its “Better Ingredients. Better Pizza.” promise and continues to invest in technology and data to improve operations, customer experience, and growth worldwide.

About DataGPT

DataGPT is the world’s first conversational AI analyst. It helps businesses explore complex data through natural language, surface key drivers and anomalies automatically, and automate recurring reporting;delivering insight at the speed teams need.

About Sleeping Giant Media

Sleeping Giant Media blends deep marketing expertise with applied emergent technology to unlock performance potential for forward-thinking brands. With a focus on insight, innovation, and impact, Sleeping Giant Media helps brands see beyond their current limits, and beyond the competition because the future belongs to those who see it first.