Takeaways:

Connected Data Creates Better Decisions – Alexandra Fulea believes restaurants struggle when labor, inventory, sales, and guest data live in disconnected systems. YourBI helps operators see the full picture so they can make smarter operational decisions.

Dashboards Need Context – Alexandra Fulea sees dashboards as tools, not solutions. The goal is giving the right people the right information at the right time so restaurant teams can stay aligned across the business.

AI Starts With Clean Data – YourBI focuses on building reliable data foundations before layering in AI. Better data leads to better forecasting, scheduling, automation, and operational consistency.

In this episode of Digital Hospitality, Shawn Walchef sits down with Alexandra Fulea, CEO and co-founder of YourBI, to discuss why restaurants are overwhelmed with data but still struggling to make better decisions. Alexandra explains how disconnected systems create operational blind spots, why dashboards alone are not enough, and how clean data foundations are becoming essential for AI, forecasting, scheduling, and scalable restaurant operations.

Alexandra Fulea thinks restaurants have a data problem.

Not because they lack information. Quite the opposite. Modern restaurant groups are flooded with reports, dashboards, scheduling systems, POS platforms, labor tools, inventory software, and finance systems. Every shift creates more numbers, more alerts, and more disconnected information. The real problem is that very little of it actually helps operators make better decisions.

“Restaurants are drowning in data, starving for answers,” Fulea said.

As CEO and co-founder of YourBI, Fulea has built her company around solving exactly that problem. The platform acts as a centralized intelligence layer for restaurant groups, pulling together sales, labor, inventory, purchasing, and operational data into one connected system designed to help operators understand what is really happening inside the business.

But Fulea is careful not to describe the company as “just dashboards.”

“Dashboards are nothing,” she said bluntly. “They are a way to visualize information. But they are not the answer.”

Fixing The Foundation

Fulea’s obsession with operational clarity started long before launching YourBI. Early in her career, she worked in strategy consulting helping large companies digitally transform. But something felt disconnected.

“We were trying to digitally transform businesses without ever being on the floor,” she said.

That realization pushed her and her co-founders deeper into hospitality operations themselves. What they discovered was not a lack of effort from operators. It was a lack of connected context.

Restaurant managers were being told labor costs were too high, so they cut hours. But cutting hours often slowed service, reduced upselling, and hurt sales. Chefs were pressured to lower food costs, so portions shrank and guest experience suffered. Every department was optimizing for its own metric without seeing the full picture.

“The first thing people do is pull the only lever they can control,” Fulea explained.

YourBI was built to connect those operational dots.

Instead of isolated reports, the platform helps restaurant groups understand why something is happening. Are labor costs high because scheduling is inefficient? Or because wages themselves need to be renegotiated at the corporate level? Are stores over-ordering inventory? Or are forecasting systems disconnected from actual sales trends?

That distinction matters because it changes the solution entirely.

For Fulea, the goal is not simply collecting data. It is creating one operational truth across the organization.

“You want everybody looking at the same truth, but in a different way,” she said.

AI Needs Clean Data

While much of the restaurant industry races toward artificial intelligence, Fulea believes many operators are skipping an important step.

“Many times these AI projects fail, and that’s not an AI problem. That’s a data problem,” she said.

If restaurant systems are filled with incomplete, inconsistent, or disconnected information, AI simply automates bad decisions faster. That is why YourBI focuses heavily on building clean data infrastructure before layering automation on top.

The company is already helping customers experiment with AI-powered scheduling, purchasing automation, forecasting tools, and custom restaurant agents. Some operators are using YourBI forecasts to automatically suggest labor schedules based on projected sales volume. Others are testing systems that connect inventory forecasts directly into supplier ordering platforms.

But Fulea sees the real opportunity as much bigger than automation itself.

“This is not just tech,” she said. “It is a whole new way of working together.”

Today, YourBI primarily works with multi-unit restaurant groups scaling between roughly ten and seventy locations, the stage where operators often begin losing visibility across stores. Independent operators still have enough proximity to feel what is happening day to day. Large enterprise brands often move slowly due to complexity. But growth-stage restaurant groups sit directly in the operational pressure zone where disconnected systems start creating friction.

That is where Fulea believes the industry is headed next.

Not toward more dashboards. Not toward more apps. Not toward more notifications.

Toward fewer blind spots.

Because in hospitality, bad decisions are rarely caused by a lack of effort. More often, they happen because nobody can see the full picture.

Episode Links

Alexandra Fulea LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandra-fulea/

YourBI: YourBI

YourBI LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/yourbi/posts/