Introduction The second and third quarters of fiscal 2025 have provided a detailed financial snapshot of the global Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) industry. This report analyzes the operational results of Domino’s Pizza, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Starbucks, and McDonald's. While top-line revenues generally grew, bottom-line profitability was nuanced by specific factors such as tax rate changes, investment valuations, one-time internal events, and restructuring charges. Summary

Artificial Intelligence (AI): Cross-Cloud Privacy Architecture Gains Traction: Researchers continue to explore architectures that combine federated learning with large-language models (LLMs) to support privacy-first collaboration across clouds. A notable arXiv paper (“Cross-Cloud Data Privacy Protection: Optimizing Collaborative Mechanisms …”) proposes a system where model updates are shared across cloud domains without exposing raw data, using secure communication layers. Ke

Artificial Intelligence (AI): Emerging Research on Governance for Agentic AI Systems: AAGATE — a production-grade governance control plane aligned to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework — was published. AAGATE is designed to run as a Kubernetes-native control plane that provides continuous risk monitoring, runtime policy enforcement and adversarial-resistance mechanisms for autonomous (agentic) AI. Key Technical Features: • Integrates NIST AI RMF controls into a Kubernetes