Square, Toast Jump into AI-Boosted Google Maps – Digital Transactions
Ask Maps brings artificial-intelligence commands to Google Maps, with Square and Toast Inc. among the first point-of-sale system companies to enable agentic food ordering within Maps.
Google is integrating elements of its Gemini AI engine into its Maps product to enable users to ask for complex, multi-step tasks such as ordering food. In an example provided by Google, a user could request an “order spicy pad kee mao with seafood for me to pick up on my way home.” Maps will then look for open restaurants on the user’s route while considering saved places and dietary needs. Google announced Ask Maps Thursday.
Once the user selects a restaurant to order from, Ask Maps can automatically add the dish to the shopping cart for review before placing an order. Beyond Square and Toast, Uber Eats availability is coming.
Square, a unit of Block Inc., says its food-and-beverage merchants that activate a Google Business Profile can surface in Ask Map results. Their menus, hours, and location details automatically sync from their Square Dashboard and require no additional setup or fees.
U.S. consumers also can use Ask Maps to browse a Square merchant’s menu, customize orders, and complete checkout using Order by Cash App.
Square says payment is prompted as a standard e-commerce purchase. The customer can use her payment method of choice, whether it’s a credit or debit card, Google Pay or Apple Pay, a Cash App balance, and gift cards. Coupons can be redeemed, too.
If the consumer is not logged into a payment method, she can manually enter card details. If logged in, Square will use the card on file associated with the user’s Cash App account.
“Our expanded work with Google means Square sellers show up in those conversations, without having to manually update their details across the many channels their business is present,” Morgan Kuntze, Block global partnerships lead, says in a statement. “We built Square to help sellers show up everywhere their customers are going, and increasingly, that’s in an AI-powered conversation like Ask Maps.”
Orders from Ask Maps flow directly into the restaurant’s POS system and its kitchen-display units, Square says.
The experience is similar for Toast merchants. By using conversational AI, Ask Maps users can find restaurants also on the Toast platform and have the same ordering experience, whether by text or voice, Toast says. Payment is made via Toast Local, a digital ordering app that consumers can use to store payment methods, within Google Maps, a Toast spokesperson says. Google Wallet transactions are not currently supported.
“Now, guests can go from searching within Google Maps to ordering from a Toast restaurant in one seamless motion, surfacing our customers’ menus at the exact moment the guest is deciding what to order—creating opportunities to turn that attention directly into revenue with no extra work required from our operators,” Kelly Esten, Toast chief marketing officer and chief operating officer of enterprise, says in a statement.
Toast merchants appear directly within the Ask Maps experience and users complete an order in one process. Ask Maps orders placed with Toast merchants go through the Toast ordering system and do not carry third-party commission fees, Toast says. Toast also is funding a promotion expected to begin later in August. It will give consumers placing an order at a Toast location using Ask Maps $5 in Toast Cash to use with a future order at a participating Toast restaurant.
Both Square and Toast participate in development of the Universal Commerce Protocol for Food, an open standard for how AI agents discover, order from, and check out with restaurants in various interfaces, such as Maps and Google Gemini. Ask Maps also enables conversational AI interactions for hotels and local events.
