Running a restaurant requires constant decision-making. Operators need to monitor sales, manage labor, review performance, and respond quickly to changing conditions throughout the day.
Toast IQ is an artificial intelligence assistant built into the Toast platform that helps restaurant operators make sense of their data and take action faster.
The AI assistant uses your restaurant’s business data, along with local market insights and trends, to provide recommendations, answer questions, and surface opportunities for improvement. Rather than simply displaying reports, it helps identify what may need attention and suggests next steps based on your business performance.
In this guide, we’ll explain what Toast IQ is, how it works, and how restaurants can use it to support daily operations.
What is Toast IQ?
Toast IQ is an AI-powered intelligence engine built into the Toast ecosystem that helps restaurant operators better understand and act on their business data. It proactively surfaces key business insights, provides recommendations, and helps automate workflows based on your restaurant’s unique performance and local market conditions.
Instead of manually reviewing reports, operators can use Toast IQ to:
- Ask questions about business performance in natural language
- Receive personalized recommendations based on business data
- View trends impacting restaurant performance
- Complete tasks directly within the platform
Toast IQ functions more like an assistant than a traditional reporting dashboard.
How Toast IQ helps restaurants make decisions
Toast IQ goes beyond reporting by helping operators understand what is happening and what actions to take next.
It can help restaurants:
- Identify trends in sales and labor
- Anticipate changes in the local market
- Recommend opportunities to improve performance
- Suggest strategies based on business patterns
Rather than waiting for owners to find issues themselves, Toast IQ proactively highlights insights that may need attention.
Use Toast IQ to improve upselling and menu performance
Toast IQ can help improve front-of-house performance by supporting smarter upselling. For example, it can:
- Suggest menu items that staff should recommend
- Highlight appetizer or add-on opportunities
- Identify products that may help increase check averages
- Prompt staff with upsell suggestions during service
Toast IQ includes menu upsell capabilities designed to help staff recommend add-ons more consistently during the ordering process.
This can help restaurants increase average order value while supporting staff during service.
Get proactive recommendations based on your data
One of Toast IQ’s biggest advantages is that it proactively delivers recommendations rather than waiting for you to ask. It can surface suggestions based on:
- Sales performance
- Labor trends
- Customer behavior
- Local market activity
This gives restaurant owners more opportunities to act quickly when something changes.
Ask questions in natural language
Toast IQ is designed to work like a conversational assistant. Instead of digging through reports, you can ask Toast IQ questions the same way you might ask a manager, accountant, or marketing team member.
For example, you can ask:
- How many burgers did we sell last week?
- Adjust Jane’s shift end time since she auto clocked out
- How could I grow my online ordering business?
Toast IQ then provides personalized answers based on your business data and may prompt you to confirm changes before making updates.
Access Toast IQ through Toast Web or Toast Now
Toast IQ is easy to access during day-to-day operations. You can find Toast IQ:
- In the top left corner of the navigation menu in Toast Web
- At the bottom of the Toast Now app
Once you start a chat, Toast IQ stores previous conversations so you can return to them later and continue where you left off. The AI assistant learns what matters most to your business over time, helping improve recommendations and personalization.
Why Toast IQ matters as your business grows
As your restaurant grows, making decisions becomes more complex. You have more data to review, more employees to manage, and more operational details to oversee. Toast IQ helps reduce that complexity by turning your business data into practical recommendations and actions.
Rather than spending time manually pulling reports and looking for trends, operators can focus on acting on insights and improving the business.
Reduce manual financial tasks as your restaurant scales
As your restaurant grows, managing your finances becomes more time-consuming, especially when it comes to sales tax.
While Toast IQ helps you understand and optimize performance, you still need to manage administrative tasks like:
- Tracking sales tax collected
- Setting tax funds aside
- Filing returns
- Making payments on time
That is where DAVO by Avalara can help. DAVO connects with Toast POS to automatically pull your sales tax data and set aside the exact amount collected each day. It also files your returns and submits your sales tax payments on time.
By automating these tasks, DAVO helps reduce manual financial work so your team can spend less time on administrative responsibilities and more time focused on running and growing the business.
Build a smarter restaurant operation
Toast IQ helps restaurant owners move beyond basic reporting by turning data into action.
With AI-powered recommendations, natural language search, and proactive business insights, Toast IQ helps operators make faster, smarter decisions across sales, staffing, and performance.
As your business grows, pairing tools like Toast IQ with automation platforms like DAVO can help streamline both operations and financial management.
