Toast (NYSE: TOST) today announced a major expansion of the Toast IQ intelligence ecosystem with a conversational AI assistant1 for restaurants and food and beverage retailers. With access to real-time and historical data across approximately 148,000 customer locations, Toast IQ is purpose-built for hospitality and designed as an operator’s “right hand.”
While many AI tools stop at answers, Toast IQ goes further—proactively surfacing insights and executing tasks directly within Toast, empowering operators to run their businesses faster and smarter. Toast IQ offers a personalized “For you” feed with timely recommendations; enables users to ask complex questions about their business in plain language, and receive proactive, tailored advice and insights; and take action—like updating menus or editing shifts—across the Toast platform, all within a single conversational interface. For example, Toast IQ can flag top-selling items by daypart, add a menu item with a single prompt, automatically update menus across every service channel, and quickly answer questions like, “Who’s working Friday night?”
Building on a collection of smart features introduced earlier this year, the Toast IQ conversational AI assistant is available to all U.S. customers on iOS and Android, and accessible through the Toast Now mobile app and Toast Web. Developed in close collaboration with customers, Toast IQ is equipped with practical skills and memory capabilities that will continue to improve, pulling in additional data sources, and adding new actions across the Toast platform over time. A true AI partner, Toast IQ helps operators uncover what really matters and act on it fast.
“Operators have access to a mountain of data that can help them make informed business decisions—but limited time to sift through it for actionable insights,” said Steve Fredette, President and Co-Founder of Toast. “Toast IQ is our answer. Working with our customers, we built this easy-to-use, always-on experience that goes beyond simply answering questions. It provides proactive, personalized recommendations and enables operators to quickly take action and make updates across the Toast platform. Toast IQ knows each user’s business and the industry, and it furthers our vision to bring practical, outcome-driven AI to restaurants and food and beverage retailers of all sizes. We will continue to enhance Toast IQ, and we look forward to seeing the additional value it can deliver.”
Toast IQ: Where Intelligence Meets Action
Recent Toast research shows that over 81% of restaurant operators agree they will use more AI in the future2—especially as they look for technology to help them improve margins, save time, or make smarter decisions.3 Toast IQ draws on real-time and historical data from the Toast platform—alongside contextual information like local weather and events—and helps operators:
- Surface tailored, proactive opportunities to dig deeper: A personalized “For you” feed and recommended “Explore” prompts give users proactive insights across sales, labor, and menu performance, highlighting trends or areas where an operator may want to more deeply investigate. For example, “Identify 10 items with the largest sales fluctuations,” or “A major event in your area this weekend may increase late-night crowds. Want to check how your staffing looks?”
- Ask complex business questions, and get personalized insights and recommendations: Toast IQ delivers clear, actionable answers to questions like, “What single change would improve my business most?” or “Which shifts are driving the highest labor cost?” Leveraging a customer’s daily transactions and data points, it provides personalized, detailed, and approachable answers. Toast IQ also analyzes a restaurant’s menu and provides practical next steps based on sales data, such as suggesting that a dish not selling well be retired.
- Take real-time action—like creating and editing items and modifiers across menus or adjusting shift auto-clockouts—directly from the chat interface: Toast IQ understands hospitality shorthand. Whether asking it to “86 all items with avocado” or “adjust a server’s clockout from Friday’s dinner shift,” Toast IQ speaks the language operators use on the floor, directly from an easy-to-use interface. Instead of requiring managers to navigate the interface and adjust settings, Toast IQ completes these tasks in seconds.
Early access customers say Toast IQ is indispensable. For Romain Bernus, Co-Owner and Head of Operations and Growth at Le Petit Four Bakery in Wellesley, MA, Toast IQ has transformed the way his team makes decisions, turning hours of late-night reporting into instant clarity:
“Pulling reports was just too slow when we’re so busy—it always meant late-night research scrolling through tabs and filters. Now, complex reports take five seconds.4 Toast IQ gives me an edge and tells me things I’d never have the time to figure out. Being educated on your own business data in a way that takes no time out of my day—it’s not just saving time. Toast IQ changes everything for small businesses like ours. We would never go back to a POS that didn’t offer this tool.
“Toast IQ makes it easy to gauge profitability ahead of time, which gives me confidence when launching something new. When we tested a seasonal Pumpkin Spice Latte, I was able to plug in the costs and daily volume, and Toast IQ showed us the margins. Now we’re launching it next week.
“I recently asked about our daily drink sales, and right away saw a clear two-week average increase on barista drinks. From Toast IQ I learned that one of our baristas was averaging 76 drinks per 60 minutes—about 50 seconds a drink, and so we gave him a bonus. It’s so positive to be able to spot and reward deserving employees.”
Toast and The Coca-Cola Company Partner to Boost Restaurant Revenue with AI-Powered Menu Optimizations
One of the top ways that restaurant owners and operators currently use AI is for optimizing menus.2 Toast is collaborating with The Coca-Cola Company to create an exclusive AI-powered feature within Toast IQ designed to help operators improve beverage sales by suggesting recommendations and optimizing menus. For example, the “For you” feed might proactively surface a card that feeds insights like beverage sales performance. From there, it can recommend optimizing the restaurant’s Coca-Cola products with features that are proven to drive ordering behaviors, like enticing photos and descriptions, which the operator can accept in only a few clicks.
“We know that restaurant operators are constantly looking for ways to boost revenue, and beverages are a high-margin way to do that with a part of the meal that is often missing from today’s digital orders,” said Josh Gurley, Vice President of Digital Partnerships & Capabilities at The Coca-Cola Company North America. “We are committed to helping our partners succeed, and our collaboration with Toast provides a powerful solution that helps them solve a fundamental business challenge by seamlessly optimizing their menus. We worked together with Toast to iterate on and refine this experience, and we’re thrilled to see this technology-enabled, AI-powered solution come to life for our customers.”
Expanding the Role of AI in Hospitality
Toast IQ will continue to evolve, with planned international availability and expanded capabilities and skills for single-location restaurants and food and beverage retailers, multi-unit operators, and enterprise accounts planned in the future.
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