Toast's Voice of the Restaurant Industry: 81% Expect to Use More AI, 40% Rank Profit #1

I read Toast’s 2025 Voice of the Restaurant Industry survey on a Thursday morning with two cups of coffee and the suspicion the AI line would be the headline. It isn’t. The AI line is the warm-up. The actual headline is buried in the goal-ranking question, and once you see it, the rest of the report stops reading like a vendor update and starts reading like a confession about where the industry’s head is at heading into 2026.

Here’s the line. Asked to rank their top business goal for 2026, 40% of the 712 restaurant decision-makers Toast surveyed between April 18 and May 13 picked “improve profitability.” “Grow revenue” came in second. That sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing. For most of the post-2021 reopening, the industry’s stated #1 goal was revenue growth — open more locations, do more covers, push higher tickets. Profitability was the trailing partner. The flip in the 2025 survey is the most concrete signal I’ve seen this year that the expansion-mode story is ending and a margin-mode story is taking its place. The Yahoo Finance writeup of the release buries this under the AI percentage. The Toast newsroom version leads with operator optimism. I’d argue both undersell the tonal shift.

The AI number, in context

The headline percentage Toast is pushing — 81% of operators expect to use more AI in the next year — is a real number, but it’s a real number that means something specific in this context. It does not mean 81% of operators believe AI will delight their guests. It means 81% expect AI to show up somewhere in their stack, and when you cross-reference that against the profitability ranking, the somewhere gets a lot more specific.

Look at the pain points the same operators flagged. Inflation, named by 20%. Marketing costs, 16%. Hiring, 16%. None of those are customer-experience problems. They’re cost-side problems. So when an operator tells Toast they expect to use more AI in 2026 and their top goal is improving profitability and their biggest headaches are input costs and labor, the AI they’re imagining is not a chatbot that delights a guest. It’s a tool that takes labor minutes out of marketing, takes guesswork out of scheduling, and takes margin leakage out of menu pricing. It’s a margin tool.

This is the reframing I think the trade press is going to spend the next quarter catching up to. For two years the conversational layer — ask in plain English, get an answer — has been the part vendors put on stage and analysts wrote up. The operator survey is telling us the operators have already moved past the demo. They want the action.

Why this lands at a particular moment

The timing is what makes the survey worth sitting with. Toast itself has spent the last eighteen months migrating its own AI story from insight to action — the Sous Chef chat box of 2024 became something more agent-shaped by mid-2025, and the public framing of where that product line is going is something we’ll cover in a forthcoming May piece once the rebrand and the agent suite are out in full view. The point for today: the vendor’s roadmap and the operator survey are pointing the same direction. Operators want margin tools. Vendors are reorienting toward shipping them. The Voice of the Restaurant Industry is the data backing what the product moves have been hinting at.

There’s also a credibility check worth running. Toast surveyed 712 decision-makers. That’s a defensible n for a topline read but not for fine slicing — I would not put weight on, say, regional segment breakdowns, and Toast doesn’t aggressively claim that kind of resolution. The fieldwork window (April 18 to May 13) means the responses predate the bulk of the summer’s tariff news and the Q3 inflation prints. If anything, that pushes the profitability-as-#1 signal in the direction of understated, not overstated. Operators answering in April were already feeling enough margin pressure to flip the ranking. Five months of subsequent macro data probably hardened that view, not softened it.

Mark interpretation

Two things to mark, then I’ll stop. First: the framing of AI as a margin tool rather than a CX play is now the consensus among operators, not a contrarian read. The job of vendors over the next two quarters is to stop pitching “delight your guests” and start pitching “save you fourteen labor hours a week on marketing.” Toast’s own agent-shaped product moves are already in this direction, and we’ll have more to say in an upcoming desk review of the suite once the marketing agent has been in the wild long enough to evaluate honestly. Second: the goal-ranking flip is the operator-side mirror image of what every public restaurant company has been telling investors on the last two earnings calls. Same-store sales are flat. Margin is the lever. The survey is the room saying the same thing without the IR script.

If you want a one-line takeaway: 2026 isn’t an AI-adoption story. It’s a margin story that happens to use AI. The 81% number is a means. The 40% number is the end.

— Maya covers restaurant tech for TableTransfers. Tips: [email protected].