More than 179,000 users engaged with Toast IQ from January to March, the first full quarter for Toast’s artificial intelligence-powered assistant for restaurants and retailers since its launch last fall.
The Boston-based digital technology platform analyzed anonymized Toast IQ data from over 125,000 restaurant locations throughout Q1 2026, revealing top use cases, such as margin protection and menu optimization, as well as trends, such as fine-dining restaurants producing 29 percent more threads than fast-casual operations.
According to the Jan. 10 Restaurant Trends Report from Toast, the top topics restaurant operators promoted Toast’s AI assistant with during the first quarter of the year were sales and revenue (47 percent), menu and inventory (34 percent), guests and marketing (32 percent), and operations and reporting (29 percent).
Toast’s list of common prompt topics from operators correlated with consistent returns of investments, according to The Definitive 2026 Guide to AI ROI for Restaurant Operators from Restaurant365, a California-based software development firm with an integrated AI platform.
Restaurant365’s report found margin growth of two to four percent over a period of six to nine months as the average impact of “Menu Engineering and P&L Decision Support” use cases, with optimized pricing and item mix as the primary benefits. Similarly, the “Inventory & Purchasing Automation” use case resulted in an average food cost improvement of two to five percent over six to 12 months, reducing over-ordering and food waste.
“Labor Cost & Efficiency” emerged as the top “pain point” restaurant operators sought assistance with from Toast IQ’s AI assistant in Q1 2026.
Margin protection proved a popular use case for the Toast AI assistant at the start of 2026. 13 percent of operators asked about help with labor costs and efficiencies; 12 percent asked about voids, comps, and loss prevention; 5 percent inquired about help with costs and profitability; and 4 percent asked about check size concerns.
Menu optimization emerged as another common topic operators sought information about from Toast’s IQ. Just over a quarter of restaurant users (26 percent) inquired about the topic, with notable interest in online ordering and delivery (10 percent); loyalty, marketing and promotions (7 percent); catering and events (7 percent); and ancillary revenue channels (5 percent).
Regarding the specific prompts restaurant operators used with Toast IQ’s AI assistant, “Create a short, easy-to-read daily briefing for my restaurant” proved the single most frequent. The top thread topics (in order of most common) were 2025 performance roundups, daily restaurant briefings, inquiries about sales performance and suggestions to refresh menu offerings.
Toast IQ’s AI assistant “power users” among restaurant operators spanned a variety of categories, ranging from high-volume breweries to independent sandwich shops.
Fine dining establishments showcased 29 percent more Toast IQ threads than fast-casual restaurants, which Toast’s trend report cited as a rational effect of complex operations with more moving parts having more opportunities for AI to assist.
Toast’s AI saw the highest average number of threads per adopted restaurant location in Florida, Georgia and Arizona; the slowest-adopting states were Maine, South Dakota, West Virginia and Alaska.
Restaurant operators from Alaska produced the most Toast IQ AI threads throughout Q1 but remained at the bottom of the adopter list, indicating that power users drove the overall thread volume.
Lastly, Toast noted particularly polite discussions on behalf of hospitality professionals when conversing with the AI assistant in early 2026, citing 33,000 instances of “please” and “thank you,” compared to 196 uses of the “F-bomb.”
Toast IQ’s Q1 2026 trends showcase how restaurant operators and other early users engaged with the AI assistant in its first full quarter since launching. While the data displays early patterns, user behavior will continue to adapt around the most impactful and relevant use cases.
“Guest & Marketing” was the most common top focus area among Toast IQ’s AI assistant users from Q1 2026 when sorted by U.S. state.
