90 Days with Toast IQ: How Restaurant Operators Are Using Toast IQ to Find Time, Protect Margins, and Grow

BOSTON, MA —Toast (NYSE: TOST) released its latest Restaurant Trends Report, providing insight into the state of the U.S. restaurant industry through an analysis of aggregated data from selected cohorts¹ of restaurants on the Toast platform, which serves approximately 171,000 locations as of March 31, 2026. 

There’s been a recent sea change in how much of the public interacts with AI technology, thanks to the rapid rise of large language models (LLMs) and other AI technologies. Mundane tasks like summarizing and analyzing sales reports, which may have taken hours before, can often be completed in seconds with a simple prompt. 

Toast launched Toast IQ, its AI assistant for restaurants and retailers, in October 2025 to help operators run their businesses faster and smarter. Because Toast IQ is connected to Toast’s restaurant platform, operators can ask questions and receive insights grounded in their own sales, labor, menu, guest, and operational data — not generic AI outputs. Today, Toast IQ can also take immediate action from users, from 86ing menu items to adjusting stock and editing auto clockouts. 

In just 90 days, operators used Toast IQ to ask questions about their sales, labor, menus, guests, and growth opportunities. The signal suggests that restaurant AI is moving beyond experimentation and into everyday operations — helping operators understand what changed, what matters, and what to do next.

To understand how customers are engaging with Toast IQ on a daily basis, Toast analyzed anonymized and aggregated inputs in Toast IQ from over 125,000 restaurant locations on the Toast platform in the U.S. that used Toast IQ Assistant between Jan. 1, 2026, and March 31, 2026.

Let’s dive in.

Restaurants are moving from AI curiosity to AI-powered operations with millions of threads from Toast IQ in Q1 2026. And hospitality pros were remarkably polite with their AI assistant. We saw 33,000 instances of “please” and “thank you” and just 196 F-bombs. 

Restaurants are using AI to manage core business decisions

Sales and revenue, menu and inventory, and guest marketing were among the most common conversation areas.

Toast IQ integrates with each restaurant's operations, serving as a right hand for operators. There’s a personalized “For you” feed that offers timely recommendations, but we also wanted to know what topics operators were inputting on their own in Q1 2026. Here’s what we saw:

• 47% of restaurants asked about sales and revenue

• 34% of restaurants asked about menu and inventory

• 32% of restaurants asked about guests and marketing

• 29% of restaurants asked about operations and reporting 

Restaurant operators have a lot on their plates, in every sense. It’s clear operators are asking Toast IQ — an AI assistant that’s built into your business — to help manage and take action on manual processes like sales and inventory data. But not far behind are tasks like getting guests in the door through marketing and ensuring they have the right staff to make the experience the best it can be. 

Operator prompts: 

• Orders and Payments: “Tips today.”

• Sales and revenue: “Break down today’s gross sales by payment type and call out which methods drove the most revenue.”

• Menu and inventory: “Refresh my menu items.” “I want to mark multiple items in or out of stock.”

• Forecasting and planning: “When precipitation is forecasted in the next hour, let me know and tell me anything important I need to know about it.”

Margin protection is emerging as a major use case

Operators asked about labor costs, voids, comps, profitability, check size, and declining performance

So what keeps restaurant operators up at night? Like many of us, it’s money. 

For insight, we used keyword searches to find how operators prompted Toast IQ in Q1 2026 on things that might not be going well, or where they might need help tracking down a solution to a problem. The clear picture: Operators are seeking help with the AI assistant Toast IQ to ensure their business costs are in check, across everything from labor to comped meals to overall profitability. The pain points below are a subset of the overall categories and are not a complete view of the various pain points operators prompted Toast IQ.

• 13% of restaurants asked about help with labor costs and efficiencies 

• 12% of restaurants asked about help with voids, comps, and loss prevention

• 5% of restaurants asked about help with costs and profitability

• 4% of restaurants asked about concerns with check sizes

Operator prompts: 

• Kitchen Speed & Ticket Times: “Average ticket time.”

• Labor cost and efficiency: “Analyze daily labor cost over the past month and highlight which days consistently incur the highest labor spend.”

• Cost and profitability: “Analyze the frequency and patterns of menu item modifiers used last week to identify most common customizations, upsell opportunities, and potential operational bottlenecks or cost impact.”

• Voids, comps, and loss prevention:”When there is a void or manager comp today, include all information and comments on the void or comp. Let me know and tell me anything important I need to know about it."

• Declining performance: “Check my forecast for the next 3 days. Include the percentage difference for the last week same day and last year same day."

Growth is top of mind

 26% of restaurants asked about menu optimization, with additional interest in loyalty, marketing, catering, delivery, and ancillary revenue

For restaurant operators, being busy is the point. Whether that’s increasing revenue channels like online ordering or catering, or optimizing menus and expanding their beverage programs, restaurants turned to Toast’s AI assistant, Toast IQ, for guidance on how to grow their operations. Among the topics, menu optimization was the most popular strategy operators asked about in Q1 2026. The opportunity areas below are a subset of the overall categories, and are not a complete view of the various scenarios operators prompted Toast IQ.

• 26% of restaurants asked about menu optimization

• 10% of restaurants asked about online ordering and delivery

• 7% of restaurants asked about loyalty, marketing, and promotions

• 7% of restaurants asked about catering and events.

• 5% of restaurants asked about ancillary revenue channels, like gift cards, merchandise, or retail.

Operator prompts: 

• Ancillary revenue channels: “Retail items sold today.”

• Upselling and cross-selling: “Create three menu upsell recommendations that can increase sales and enhance the dining experience. Recommend at least two different upsell types.”

• Beverage program growth: “What are the top-selling cocktails from 5 p.m. yesterday to 2  a.m. today?  Number them in order. List name of item, then total amount sold.”

• Loyalty, marketing and promotions: “Break down loyalty sales last week as a percentage of overall sales by order source. Highlight trends where loyalty-driven sales are strongest. Identify peak periods and recommend steps to help increase loyalty engagement.”

• Operational Improvement: “Break down labor cost as a percentage of net sales from last month compared to the same period last year, segmented by role, shift, or daypart, to help evaluate staffing efficiency and cost control.”

Daily intelligence is resonating

The most frequently used prompt was “Create a short, easy-to-read daily briefing for my restaurant.”

Diving a little deeper, we analyzed some of the most common threads restaurant operators were engaging with on Toast IQ. The most popular threads in Toast IQ were initiated by users from a set of preset questions, largely due to variations in language, phrasing, and typos. 

Among the top results in Q1 2026 were a roundup of 2025 performance, daily restaurant briefings, questions about sales performance, and suggestions to refresh menu items. Looking at the Top 3 prompts, it seems operators were particularly interested in using AI to distill complicated matters into brief overviews. While the highest percentage of restaurants asked about their year in review, “Create a short, easy-to-read daily briefing for my restaurant”  was the most frequently used prompt. 

Operators also asked about their employees’ performance, their most expensive days for labor costs, the health of the business, and what type of local events are going on outside of the four walls of their restaurants.

Fine dining is all in on AI

So, which types of restaurants are utilizing AI to help their operations? Power users ranged from high-volume breweries to small mom-and-pop sandwich shops and everything in between. 

Broken down by restaurant category, restaurants with more complex operations, like full-service restaurants, were using the platform more than those with simpler operations, like cafes or fast-casual restaurants. Which makes sense — the more complex the operation, the more moving pieces and opportunities for AI to help. Fine dining locations had 29% more threads in Toast IQ than fast-casual restaurants. 

Which states used Toast IQ the most?

So where are those power users located? Zooming out to the state level, restaurants in Florida had the highest average number of threads per adopted restaurant location, followed by Arizona and Georgia.

The states with the slowest adoption were Maine and South Dakota, followed by West Virginia and Alaska.

That doesn’t mean that those states don’t have power users. The restaurant with the most threads in Q1 2026 was actually in Alaska. But overall, across all restaurant locations included in the analysis, this is the usage across each individual state.

The points of focus for restaurants in every U.S. state

And to get a sense of how those users in different states were interacting with Toast IQ, we looked at focus areas that deviated the most from the national average. As mentioned earlier, restaurant operators prompted Toast IQ most on the topic of sales and revenue. The map below is a look at the topics restaurant operators over-indexed on compared to the national average. In other words, what operators were asking about at an uncommon rate.

Some trends appeared, with a large number of states across the northeast and through the Midwest focusing more on guest and marketing. That trend was also prevalent in mid-Atlantic states, and some in the Southeast, like Virginia and Kentucky.

States with a high number of restaurants, like New York, Florida, and Texas were more focused on menu and inventory, while states like Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico, and Minnesota were focused on labor and staffing.

Oklahoma was the lone state that prompted more questions about external factors that may be affecting their operations.

Stay tuned on Data by Toast for more insights into Toast’s AI assistant, Toast IQ, and how operators are utilizing the technology to run their businesses better.