Karimnagar native Raghu Sagi figures in Forbes CIO Next list

Hyderabad: Yet another Telanganite brought laurels to the State, when his name figured in the Forbes CIO Next list released on Friday. Raghu Sagi, who hails form Karimnagar made it to the most coveted Forbes list. Raghu Sagi is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Inspire Brands, a multi-brand restaurant company, whose portfolio includes brands […]

Hyderabad: Yet another Telanganite brought laurels to the State, when his name figured in the Forbes CIO Next list released on Friday. Raghu Sagi, who hails form Karimnagar made it to the most coveted Forbes list. Raghu Sagi is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Inspire Brands, a multi-brand restaurant company, whose portfolio includes brands like Arby’s, Baskin-Robbins, Buffalo Wild Wings, Dunkin, Jimmy John’s, Rusty Taco and Sonic Drive-in restaurants worldwide.

Raghu oversees all business and technical aspects of Inspire Brands’ technology shared services including customer-facing digital, data, restaurant technology, enterprise architecture and applications, infrastructure and security. Raghu Sagi studied in Warangal and Jagityal and later pursued an engineering course from JNTU- Hyderabad. He was earlier the Chief Engineering Officer in Sephora, one of the world’s largest cosmetics companies. He was also earlier Director of Engineering in Walmart, world’s biggest retailer. His father Sanjeev Rao is a retired Government veterinary doctor and currently lives in Karimnagar Town.

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Last year, the privately owned Inspire Brands reported more than $30 billion in sales at its nearly 32,000 restaurants. The former Walmart executive Raghu Sagi and his team have played a key role driving innovation at brands such as Buffalo Wild Wings, where since 2019 digital sales have almost doubled to nearly $1.5 billion, or 40% of total sales.

The $11.3 billion acquisition of Dunkin’ and Baskin-Robbins in 2020 took Inspire’s total loyalty rewards members to 48 million, and Sagi’s been using AI and machine learning to serve up personalized incentives to them, Forbes said in the feature recognizing 50 top tech leaders who are redefining the CIO role and driving game-changing innovation. The list also includes a few other people of Indian origin.

These CIOs work with tech behemoths, healthcare and real estate enterprises, and MNCs. “What they all have in common is a passion for using technology to help shape the future of business,” said Forbes, the American business magazine that features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing and also reports on related subjects such as technology, communications, science, politics, and law.

The CIOs influence extends way beyond technology itself. They care a great deal about diversity, launching programmes to recruit and retain diverse tech staff, becoming executive sponsors of employee support groups and backing industry-wide initiatives to broaden tech’s talent pool. They also care about sustainability, finding creative ways to use technology and data to cut carbon emissions from data centers and other sources, it further said.

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