Toast Launches ToastIQ

Toast has introduced ToastIQ, an intelligence engine delivering timely prompts, personalized recommendations, and automated workflows to transform daily restaurant operations.

Built natively into Toast's end-to-end platform, ToastIQ draws on insights from millions of transactions and interactions across 130,000 locations and fuses AI, historical patterns, and proprietary insights.

The first ToastIQ features are the following:

• Menu Upsells, which prompt staff to suggest recommended additions to guest orders. Integrated into order-taking on Toast Go handhelds and Toast terminals, Menu Upsells help ensure servers recommend upsells consistently.
• Digital Chits, which pull guest details from Toast Tables reservations and Guestbook profiles, like special occasions, guest requests, and visit history, and display them on Toast Go handhelds and POS terminals.
• Shift at a Glance, which streamlines critical communication between managers and staff, delivering timely updates right to Toast Go handhelds and terminals to share key details, like specials, low stock items, or staffing changes right from the Toast Now manager app. Staff can access this information as they clock in and stay informed throughout their shifts.
• The enhanced AI-Marketing Assistant, which builds cross-channel marketing plans customized for each restaurant. Synthesizing inputs such as restaurant data, daily sales reports, and menu and item performance from on-premise and Online Ordering, the AI- Marketing Assistant crafts detailed, personalized marketing plans for email, SMS, and social media. Outputs include pre-designed and pre-written campaigns for holidays and events, promotions like BOGO deals and happy hours, business and menu updates, and more.
• Advertising, which turns clicks into measurable revenue. Toast connects ad performance directly to transactions across online, in-person, and catering orders. Restaurant operators can create and manage digital ads on Google channels such as Search and Maps, and Meta channels such as Facebook and Instagram, directly from Toast.

"Restaurants have a wealth of data available to help them optimize their business but often don't have the time or training to interpret and act on it," said Steve Fredette, president and co-founder of Toast, in a statement. "Our vision for ToastIQ is to transform every role in the restaurant ecosystem with intelligent features, greater personalization, prompts, and shortcuts across our connected products, all driving toward outsized business outcomes.

"Building ToastIQ required foundational advances in data architecture, AI, and on-device intelligence purpose-built for the fast, complex nature of restaurant operations. From using AI models to streamline marketing plans, to syncing guest insights from reservations to handhelds in real time, to powering ROI-driven ad performance, ToastIQ brings intelligence into the flow of hospitality, service, and growth. This marks the beginning of a new stage of innovation where software evolves beyond a tool restaurant professionals use, into a partner that helps them elevate their craft," Fredette added.