AI TRAINING
Toast AI Tools for Restaurant Owners and GMs
Use Toast's built-in AI features to cut labour costs, engineer menus, and respond to reviews faster.
What it covers
This hands-on workshop teaches restaurant owners and general managers how to extract actionable value from Toast's AI-powered features, including Sous Chef analytics, ToastIQ benchmarks, and automated review-response generation. Participants will learn to interpret menu engineering suggestions, run labour-cost drilldowns, and act on performance data without needing a data analyst. The session combines short concept explanations with live practice inside the Toast back-office, using each participant's own restaurant data where possible. By the end, teams leave with a prioritised action list they can implement the following week.
What you'll be able to do
- Identify at least three menu items to reprice or promote using Toast Sous Chef suggestions
- Run a labour-cost drilldown and pinpoint at least one scheduling inefficiency within Toast analytics
- Compare your restaurant's KPIs against ToastIQ benchmarks and explain the gaps
- Draft and publish an AI-assisted response to a negative customer review within the Toast interface
- Set up at least two automated weekly performance alerts in Toast back-office
Topics covered
- Navigating Toast Sous Chef analytics and interpreting AI-generated insights
- Reading and acting on menu engineering suggestions (stars, plowhorses, dogs)
- Labour-cost drilldowns: identifying scheduling inefficiencies with ToastIQ data
- Benchmarking your restaurant against Toast's industry cohort data
- Generating and customising AI review responses for Google and Yelp
- Setting up weekly reporting alerts to monitor key metrics automatically
- Prioritising quick wins vs. longer-term operational changes
Delivery
Delivered in-person at a single location or virtually via video call with screen-sharing into participants' Toast back-office accounts. Facilitator shares a structured workbook; roughly 70% of session time is hands-on practice. Participants should have their Toast admin login and at least one period of historical sales data available. A brief 30-minute follow-up call is recommended two weeks post-session to review progress on action items.
What makes it work
- Designating one person (owner or GM) as the weekly analytics reviewer to ensure consistent follow-up
- Connecting menu changes directly to the next Toast reporting cycle to measure impact quickly
- Customising AI review-response templates to match the restaurant's voice before going live
- Scheduling a 30-day check-in after the workshop to validate action-item completion
Common mistakes
- Ignoring ToastIQ cohort benchmarks because they assume their restaurant is too unique to compare
- Applying menu engineering labels without considering local ingredient costs or supplier constraints
- Using AI-generated review responses verbatim without personalising tone or addressing specific complaints
- Focusing only on revenue metrics and overlooking labour-cost data that erodes margins
When NOT to take this
This workshop is not appropriate for restaurants that have not yet fully onboarded onto Toast POS or have fewer than three months of transaction data — the analytics features require sufficient historical data to generate meaningful suggestions.
Providers to consider
Sources
This training is part of a Data & AI catalog built for leaders serious about execution. Take the free diagnostic to see which trainings your team needs.