In May of 2025, I wrote a column about the evolution of the restaurant point-of-sale based on conversations I’d had at the National Restaurant Association Show. Some of the innovations I covered included “checkless payments” and the ability for managers to monitor operations from their phone. Square had just launched its first handheld device for servers. Artificial intelligence was not mentioned until the third-to-last paragraph.
Reading it now, less than a year and a half later, it feels almost quaint.
In that relatively short time span, major POS suppliers have begun to reimagine themselves for the age of AI, a technology that is quickly redefining what their products can do, and how much they can charge for them.
The first wave of POS AI has come in the form of chatbots that can be queried about sales, labor costs, or loyalty redemptions — anything that the system collects or has access to.
This in and of itself is not a very surprising development. Consumers have been chatting with super-smart AI bots for almost five years now. As PAR CEO Savneet Singh noted during a Goldman Sachs tech conference last week, “What we're doing is like every company in the world will do in software, which is like ChatGPT for your restaurant.”
But for PAR and others, chatbots are just the first step in a much more expansive plan: Use AI to do more of the work of actually running the restaurant.
The next step for PAR, after the chatbot, which it is calling Assist, are tools that Advise and then Act on the operator’s behalf. These will be part of PAR Intelligence, a single-login dashboard encompassing all of PAR's products.
Advise, for instance, could alert a manager that the drive-thru is running behind. Act could then suggest shutting off DoorDash so that the kitchen can focus on the drive-thru. “You press the button and it takes the action,” Singh said. It is slated to debut early next year.
PAR is one of many POS suppliers launching AI tools that take initiative rather than just respond to prompts. These are called agents, much like the ones consumers are now using to do things like book restaurant reservations or order groceries.
For example:
Owner has AI agents that can run a restaurant’s website and marketing.
Qu’s Intelligent Commerce Platform features actionable insights and recommendations as well as agents that help with promotions and discounts.
Square’s Managerbot can flag issues that need an operator’s attention. It can also perform certain tasks on its own (with human approval), like creating team schedules.
SpotOn’s Profit AI can proactively surface ways to improve profitability and provide recommendations for next steps.
Toast’s IQ Grow develops and runs marketing campaigns based on sales data. It’s the first in a planned suite of agents that will handle all sorts of things, including payroll, scheduling, and bookkeeping.
“Longer term, imagine a series of agents across these services,” said Toast CEO Aman Narang during the company’s quarterly earnings call last month. “Working in concert, they'll be able to build a restaurant's projected demand, look at food costs and availability, labor schedules, and projected guest patterns to drive suggestions that improve profitability.”
All of these products are built upon the POS’ role as the restaurant’s data clearinghouse. That role is not new, but for a long time, it has been difficult for operators to get access to all of that data in a useful form, let alone decide what to do with it. AI, with its predilection for crunching numbers and identifying patterns, has suddenly made that a lot easier. It promises to take work off of busy managers’ plates, and even bring services that are often outsourced, like bookkeeping, in-house.
As such, POS providers view these AI tools as a big revenue opportunity.
Toast IQ Grow, which costs $499 a month, is the company’s fastest-growing new product ever. Since launching in May, it is on track to reach $10 million in annual recurring revenue. There has been so much demand for it that the company has a backlog of restaurants waiting to use it, Narang said during the Goldman Sachs conference.
“AI has really presented a much bigger opportunity for us to drive [average revenue per unit] growth over the long term, and IQ Grow is the first product that we're seeing really great traction,” CFO Elena Gomez said during the same conference.
Singh said 2,000 restaurant locations have signed up for PAR Intelligence, and its goal is to have 50,000 locations using Assist by the end of the year. Assist is free, but the company plans to use it as a springboard to get restaurants into the paid Advise and Act tiers.
The question, of course, is how good will AI be at actually running a restaurant, one of the most complex and idiosyncratic businesses there is?
And even if it is capable, will the results be worth the price, which seems likely to be quite high?
With most of these AI products in their early stages, it’s probably too soon to answer those fundamental questions.
But they may have already laid a different long-running debate to rest. I opened my May 2025 column by saying that the restaurant point-of-sale, as we once knew it, is dead. If these AI efforts take hold, it might be just getting started.