Toast, Inc.

And finally, we close today with a drive-thru AI story out of the restaurant tech world.

Presto Phoenix is in the news once again because this time it has integrated its voice AI ordering tool with Toast's partner, EcoSystem, according to a press release from the two companies, meaning restaurants running Toast's point-of-sale system can now deploy Presto's tool without much additional hardware.

Orders taken by Presto get piped straight into the kitchen display system through Toast.

Presto says the integration is live already with a Toast customer and that the tool is hitting roughly 95% order accuracy with workers stepping in about 10% of the time.

Drive-thru voice AI, while definitely on the upswing, still hasn't become ubiquitous in fast food despite years of pilots at brands like Dairy Queen, Taco John's, and everyone's favorite, Wienerschnitzel.

And easier integration through a POS player like Toast could be exactly what nudges smaller multi-location QSR brands to finally try it out.

And I, for one, am all in on the tech.

That's all for today.

Nothing fancy and nothing that needs special software.

The restaurant side of this is what I've been studying, and Toast's published roundup of restaurant email examples lands in the same place.

The strong ones each do a single thing, say a single thing, and leave the guest with an obvious next move.

Now, Here's what I keep noticing.

I'm going to group them into five families so you can hear the pattern instead of memorizing a list.

One, one note before we start.

Every example I'm about to share comes from that same roundup that Toast did.

And every one of them is a national chain.

And it integrates with the systems that you already use, right? It integrates with the top, it's like the top 30 point of sale systems or something like that.

Definitely Toast, you know, SpotOn, Clover, Square, Shift4, Olo, like all of the big POS systems, Aloha, NCR.

It integrates with the point of sale systems, the reservation management systems, the OpenTable, the Resi, the seven rooms, right? So...

your phones can be handled 100% of the time and your in-store, you know, your front of house people can focus on the people in the front of house that are in your restaurant.

Go use ChatGPT.

See how much...

Put your menu in it and say, where can I optimize? What am I doing wrong here? Here's my reports from Toast.

What should I get rid of? If you're not embracing AI as an operator, you're going to fall severely behind.

I'm Marco Zetilny, a partner in our Boston office.

Today, we're excited to welcome Brian Elworthy, General Counsel at Toast.

I'm sure most of our audience knows Toast.

Toast is one of the great technology growth stories to emerge from Boston over the last decade.

Toast began with a simple but ambitious idea that restaurants deserve technology built specifically for the way they operate.

Today, the company has grown into a leading technology platform for the restaurant industry.

So from independent neighborhood restaurants to some of the country's largest hospitality brands, Toast has become an essential operating platform for an industry that is both dynamic and complex.

Brian joined Toast in 2016, long before it became the public company that it is today.

And this is quite a list.

Uber, Lyft, Slack, Pinterest, Toast, Harry's, Everlane, Box, Blackbuck, Easy Cater.

In 2018, at the Irisone Conference, you presented Palo Alto Networks, far, far cheaper price than where it is today.

At a later Zone Conference, you presented Farfetch'd.

But then there is good news.

Toast, the retail POS platform, surveyed 340 convenience grocery and liquor stores.

An Earth survey shows 30% of convenience retailers feel excited about the health of their businesses and another 63% feel good.

That's 93% of retailers feeling optimistic about the future.