In the restaurant industry, the toughest competition isn’t always the place down the street. It’s the clock.
Marketing is critical for filling seats, but between staffing issues, inventory headaches, and day-to-day service demands, it’s often the first task to get pushed aside. Hiring an in-house marketing team can be expensive, and carving out hours to brainstorm promotions or craft social media posts is rarely realistic. No floor manager dreams of spending their one free hour debating social media captions.
That’s the reality for Kostas Sousoulas, co-owner of Diner Hospitality Group. Running multiple restaurants means his days are packed with operational fires, leaving little room for consistent marketing.
So when he heard about Toast’s AI Marketing Assistant, Kostas saw an opportunity to keep marketing on track without adding hours to his workload.
“Running these businesses, I don’t always have the time to dedicate to marketing,” he says. “We don’t have someone to do in-house marketing, so this is so easy for me to use. That AI feature, especially, makes it so simple.”
Marketing that doesn’t take up all your time
Toast’s generative AI-powered marketing assistant takes your inputs and combines them with insights from your Toast data, like recent sales trends and top menu items, to automatically generate personalized email content. From there, you can make any edits you’d like and send the campaign directly to your customers.
For Kostas, this meant marketing no longer had to be an all-day task.
“I started to use [AI Marketing Assistant] for a monthly marketing plan. I just did August — it took me 15 minutes, and I had the whole month done,” he says. “This is why I really like this tool. It’s really easy and simple to create these promotions. I feel like you can do this without being a marketing expert.”
Within just a few weeks, the results spoke for themselves.
“I’ve been using the gift card promo and the slow days campaign, which have been really successful. The sales I’m generating from these are substantial. I’ve only been live for about two and a half weeks, and I’ve already made $5,200 in sales.* I’m definitely very happy and very impressed with it so far.”
Your BEC just got an ROI
The AI Marketing Assistant doesn’t just push generic promotions. It uses your recent sales data to tailor campaigns.
“It figured out I sell a lot of Bacon, Egg, and Cheese sandwiches, and it created its own post for that,” Kostas says. “It’s been really impressive what it can do.”
It also makes tracking results easy, something many traditional marketing channels can’t deliver.
“I did a gift card promo, I offered 10% off, and I generated close to $2,000 in gift card sales.* The nice thing is, you can track it. With social media or billboards, it can feel impossible to tell if I’ve gained business. But here I can see that somebody purchased [something] from this campaign.”
Your restaurant’s new superpower: AI marketing
For busy restaurant managers, tools like Toast’s AI Marketing Assistant can have a huge impact. With one easy-to-use feature that removes guesswork, suggests data-driven campaigns, and tracks real results, restaurants can finally make marketing work for them, not against their schedule. And unlike other superpowers, you won’t need to hide this one from the public.
Request a demo to explore ToastIQ features like AI Marketing Assistant, Shift at a Glance (a Toast beta offering), and Digital Chits to help enhance your service.
*Based on Toast internal data from July 2025. Individual results will vary.
