• In April 2026, Toast launched Toast Drive-Thru, an enterprise-grade, AI-enabled platform for quick-service drive-thrus, and Alicart Restaurant Group announced it had rolled out Toast’s technology, including Toast IQ, across its high-volume concepts such as Carmine’s, Virgil’s Real BBQ, and Mermaid Oyster Bar.

• The combination of an AI-informed drive-thru solution and data-driven wins like menu optimization at Virgil’s BBQ highlights how Toast is extending its platform into higher-complexity, higher-volume restaurant operations.

• Next, we’ll examine how Toast Drive-Thru’s AI voice ordering capabilities could influence Toast’s investment narrative and long-term growth thesis.

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Toast Investment Narrative Recap

To own Toast, you have to believe its unified platform can keep winning higher-volume hospitality customers while turning AI tools into meaningful, recurring software and fintech revenue. The Drive-Thru launch and Alicart rollout both speak to that thesis, but they do not remove near term concerns around competitive pressure and the need to keep customer acquisition efficient as Toast continues to invest heavily in growth.

The Drive-Thru announcement looks especially relevant here because it leans directly into labor efficiency and higher throughput, two of Toast’s core catalysts tied to automation and AI. If Drive-Thru and tools like Toast IQ gain traction across large brands, they could reinforce the idea that Toast’s platform scales from SMB to enterprise and supports higher average revenue per location, even as risks around hardware costs, tariffs, and GPV per location remain very real.

Yet despite all this promise, investors still need to factor in the risk that rising competition and weaker restaurant sales could...

Read the full narrative on Toast (it's free!)

Toast’s narrative projects $10.1 billion revenue and $935.1 million earnings by 2029.

Uncover how Toast's forecasts yield a $36.36 fair value , a 25% upside to its current price.

Exploring Other Perspectives

The most bullish analysts were already assuming Toast could reach about US$10.5 billion in revenue and US$1.2 billion in earnings by 2028, which is a far more optimistic story than the baseline view that emphasizes slower growth and margin pressure from expansion into new segments. With fresh Drive-Thru and AI news in play, your own take on whether Toast can actually sustain that kind of adoption and profitability might sit somewhere in between these narratives.