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Point-of-sale technology developer Toast Inc. early Thursday announced enhancements to its Toast IQ AI assistant, an artificial intelligence-based app within the Toast platform that aims to provide retailers insights into how to run their businesses more efficiently.
The Toast IQ AI assistant, which responds to natural-language prompts from users, allows retailers to see which items are selling, which are running low, and where margin opportunities lie. In inventory management, for example, retailers can ask the app “what items need restocking this week?” and see data on which items are nearing depletion, out of stock, or have been inactive for 30 days. Such information helps retailers adjust their inventory management and replenishment strategies, Boston-based Toast says.
With the enhancements, retailers can also receive margin-based pricing information to flag underperforming products and rebalance costs. This involves asking such questions as, “what level should prices be set at to maintain current margins” or “what type of pricing strategy would increase sales by $1,000 a month,” for example.
According to Toast, the enhancements also enable merchants to organize and optimize product catalogs by highlighting missing or duplicate items and barcodes, identifying out-of-date shelf labels, and making recommendations to maintain clean, searchable catalogs. In addition, Toast IQ can also create and edit items or mark a stockkeeping unit as out of stock directly from the chat interface, Toast says.
“Retailers need new ways to unlock greater efficiency and growth—without adding time spent or operational complexity,” Omri Traub, chief operating officer, retail, for Toast, says in a statement. “With Toast IQ, operators have an AI-powered ‘right hand’ partner that understands the flow of inventory and pricing as naturally as a store manager does, surfacing helpful, actionable insights at the right time.”
Future enhancements to the Toast IQ AI assistant are expected to include the ability to scan invoices directly into the Toast platform, thereby eliminating the need for manual entry. Other planned enhancements include integrations with DIGI America Inc., a technology provider to supermarkets, and Upshop 360, a provider of AI tools to grocery stores. The integrations will enable the platform to support weighing and labeling solutions, a capability expected to allow retailers to make hundreds of daily price changes on weighted items instantly.
Toast is also planning an advertising module that enables restaurants to launch digital ads across the Google and Meta platforms and connect campaign performance directly to online and in-store sales. During the pilot phase, retailers running Google Ads campaigns have seen a more than eight-fold return on their ad spend, Toast says.
Toast says it also plans to add barcode scanning to its Toast Go 3 handheld payment terminals. The new capabilities will enable staff to process sales, check inventory, and execute stock-takes while on the go.
