A slate of restaurant technology partnerships and artificial intelligence-powered new features last week showcased Google Maps’ effort to expand beyond navigation and discovery, partnering with tech vendors to let its 2 billion monthly users order directly through the app.
Ask Maps, a feature initially unveiled in March that combines Google’s AI chatbot Gemini with the nation’s most downloaded navigation app, allows users to discover restaurants and other eligible merchants and place orders through an AI a conversational ordering experience. Google announced the new agentic capability August 6, rolling out food ordering capabilities with point-of-sale system partners Square and Toast, with Uber Eats to follow soon.
Toast announced an expanded integration with Google Aug. 6 that enables agentic ordering for partner restaurants and retailers through Google Maps’ Ask Maps.
After selecting a restaurant, users communicating with voice or text can request recommendations and specific food requests. Ask Maps draws from Square and Toast restaurant dashboards to sync menu information and key operating details [such as hours and locations] to answer guest questions and guide users through order completion.
“The way people find a restaurant to book, a cafe to visit, or take-out to order is evolving,” Morgan Kuntze, Global Partnerships Lead at Block Inc., Square’s parent company, said in a press release. “Our expanded work with Google means Square sellers show up in those conversations, without having to manually update their details across the many channels their business is present. We built Square to help sellers show up everywhere their customers are going, and increasingly, that’s in an AI-powered conversation like Ask Maps.”
Square boasts more than 450,000 food and beverage business partners and reported a 16-percent year-over-year increase in gross payment volume from those sellers in late 2025. Toast’s restaurant and retail partner network consists of about 180,000 total locations, a 22-percent year-over-year increase alongside a 25 percent hike in annual recurring revenue as of June 30, according to the company’s Q2 2026 financial results.
To spur early adoption, Toast is offering a $5 credit to guests who place orders through a Toast restaurant via Ask Maps. Guests can redeem the offer through the Toast Local App, which serves as a direct communication channel for promotions. The initiative is expected to launch in late August.
“Now, guests can go from searching within Google Maps to ordering from a Toast restaurant in one seamless motion, surfacing our customers’ menus at the exact moment the guest is deciding what to order—creating opportunities to turn that attention directly into revenue with no extra work required from our operators,” Kelly Esten, Toast’s chief marketing officer and chief operating officer of enterprise, said in a press release.
While Google and the new Ask Maps POS partners revealed many details about Uber’s ambitions for the agentic ordering platform, an Aug. 7 LinkedIn post by Uber’s chief product officer, Sachin Kansal, noted that “Google Maps users will begin to see Uber Eats in Google’s Ask Maps” very soon.
Kansal’s post stated Ask Map users will be able to browse menus, view delivery times and construct orders before seamlessly checking out in the Uber Eats app.
