How Are You Using Toast IQ?

[Rob]

I recently had the chance to chat with a few customers, and they shared how Toast IQ has become a game-changer for them. Many mentioned using it like a personal assistant, helping them make sense of reports, uncover sales insights, and even plan menu updates around local events.
Here’s one story that really stood out from one of our community members!

“This tool is so much more helpful than running reports and feeding them into another AI program. For example, I wanted to see sales numbers comparing Oct 24/25. I realize those numbers are easily accessible in reports, but then I told it we opened an extra day in April 2025 — what was that impact? It responded easily with numbers, percentages, and divided it into categories driving higher sales. We added DoorDash in 2025 — what was that impact? Again, it easily provided numbers and percentages.”
 — @tinathom 

If you’ve got your own stories about how Toast IQ has helped your restaurant, or ideas for how it could be even better, we’d love to hear them in the comments below!
Also, feel free to share any prompts you’ve been using that have helped you get great results; others in the community might find them useful, too!

[KellyLynn01]

Hello, everyone!

Like you all, I've been using Toast IQ for a couple of weeks now and I wanted to share a little bit about my experience. First of all, Toast IQ has definitely become a huge part of familiarizing myself with AI in general: how to prompt AI, how to more finely-tune requests, and just getting to know how to leverage the power of this tool to benefit my business.

One of the first things I noticed is that Toast IQ is NOT equal to general AI like Chat GPT or Google Gemini. Toast IQ directly tailors your prompts to you business by using your actual restaurant data including sales and operations and combines that with external factors like local events and weather to turn this data into answers to questions any restaurant owner might have like "how should I staff for the weekend?" or "what items should I prep more of today?". 

As evidenced above by @HearthpizzeriaB and @ashokr, Toast IQ is brand new this year and I've found a few discrepancies with these answers, however, the potential is here for a HUGE gamer changer with this program for all Toast users once the program and AI itself becomes more developed. 

One of the most helpful tips I've received from Toast IQ after prompting it to compare sales numbers across days and staff is that I have a few standout employees who consistently see higher volumes of guests, have larger tickets, and upsell more than other staff. Toast IQ was able to identify this and give me the tip that other servers could possibly shadow these employees or even just chat with them about their personal strategies, likely ending in higher sales numbers, higher tips across the board, and even all-around employee empowerment. This was fascinating to learn and see the raw data alongside these tips, showing me that Toast IQ goes beyond the superficial "how busy will I be today" and has the potential to really help users dive deeper into their operations and understand more than we thought possible - all with a few clicks!

If anyone else has any favorite prompts for Toast IQ that surprised them, let me know here! I love to share ideas and I'm always looking for new insights help make improvements to my small business!

[ashokr]

I did something the other day which I was so thankful to ToastIQ. I never thought this would work, but tried it to check if it works.

We ran out of lamb, and we have couple of dishes that i want to mark Out of Stock. So i said find all lamb items, then said mark them as out of stock. It made it easy that I didn't have to go item by item and mark them individually. I was hesitant but surprised it worked. Now this has gone past my personal ChatBot 🙂

[Sdaniel]

Hi everyone!

I recently received access to Toast IQ, and while I don’t yet have much experience using it, it has already been helpful, particularly with menu building and cleanup. For example, we have multiple modifier groups, and I had previously been unable to find a report that clearly showed which pre-modifier groups were tied to which modifier groups. Using Toast IQ, I entered a pre-modifier group number and asked it to identify any modifier groups that referenced it. This revealed that we had several pre-modifier groups that were not assigned to any modifier groups, allowing me to confidently archive those unused pre-modifier groups. While there is a menu cleanup tool available, it takes a long time to load and only shows modifier groups that include a pre-modifier group, rather than identifying the exact relationships. Because of this, Toast IQ proved to be a much more efficient option. I’m excited to continue utilizing Toast IQ as I become more familiar with it.

One piece of feedback I have is related to MLM functionality. For example, when I asked a question related to comps and wanted to gather data for a specific comp code across all locations, Toast IQ only pulled data for the location I was currently logged into. To retrieve data for all locations, I would need to switch locations individually, which would require doing this for 26 locations. Having an option to pull MLM data across all locations at once would be extremely helpful.