Why Hospitality Tech Firm Toast Wants India to Lead its Fintech, AI Stack

Recently, Toast, the US-based restaurant management software company, inaugurated its new global technology centre (GCC) in Bengaluru.With the company’s dedicated product, engineering, and R&D teams based in Bengaluru, the new centre will accelerate innovation, improve scalability, and support faster development cycles aligned with Toast’s global customers and partners.

Since establishing its presence in India in 2022, Toast says it has seen 4x growth in headcount across its Bengaluru and Chennai offices combined.

Speaking to AIM, Steve Fredette, President and Co-founder, Toast mentions that India’s most critical contribution lies in fintech and AI. The data science and machine learning teams based in India now power most of Toast’s fintech products.

“The engine for Toast Capital is here,” Fredette says. “Payroll fraud, cash-flow insights, forecasting—this is all data science and AI work happening out of India.”

Toast’s cash flow insights product, for instance, uses AI to automatically categorise expenses—rent, labour, food, marketing—and forecast future costs. This capability will form the foundation for an upcoming AI-powered bookkeeping product being developed by Toast’s India team.

“A lot of the ML model work that powers fintech products within Toast is based out of India,” Kavita Viswanath, Senior VP and India Country Lead, adds. “What started with one product has now grown to models supporting almost all our fintech offerings.”

Toast Ads, a recently launched AI-powered marketing tool, is also built entirely by the India team, reinforcing the centre’s product ownership credentials.

When Toast first set up operations in India, the plan wasn’t to build just another service delivery arm. From the outset, the company saw India—particularly Bengaluru—as a long-term innovation hub capable of shaping its global product roadmap across fintech, AI, and enterprise commerce.

“We always had a thought towards product innovation,” Fredette says. “Bengaluru is a place where we feel you have a very mature tech ecosystem. You can get the best talent, including people coming from startups. We still think of ourselves as a growth company—almost like a big startup.”

Unified Innovation Engine

Toast’s India journey had two beginnings. One was the Chennai team, which was onboarded after the acquisition of xtraCHEF, which offered back-office tools for restaurants, and continued to expand across multiple business functions while innovating on the acquired product. The second was a deliberate decision to establish a new centre in Bengaluru.

Early teams in Bengaluru were not back-office support functions. Instead, Toast anchored the centre around high-impact domains such as fraud and risk, data science, and enterprise reporting. Over time, the charter expanded into core innovation initiatives.

“We started with the fraud and risk fintech team and the data science team very early,” Viswanath says. “Enterprise applications were also among the first teams here.”

Powering Toast’s Next Growth Engines

Today, the India GCC plays a central role in Toast’s three major growth levers: enterprise expansion, international markets, and new verticals beyond restaurants.

“Historically, we were a small US restaurant company,” Fredette says. “Now, we’re going upmarket into enterprise, expanding internationally, and moving into retail. The team here is helping us innovate across all three [domains].”

While the Chennai team focuses heavily on retail use cases, the Bengaluru centre supports enterprise-scale products and international markets such as the UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia.

Rather than committing to a single AI vendor, Toast follows a multi-model strategy, optimising for cost, latency, and accuracy. “We definitely don’t believe in sticking to just one model,” he notes. “We use OpenAI, Anthropic, some Gemini, and even open-source models when it makes sense.”

This flexibility is enabled by an internal LLM proxy that allows teams to switch between models depending on the use case.

“There are always trade-offs,” Viswanath explains. “Latency, cost, accuracy—no model optimises for everything.”

AI-Native Engineering Culture

Inside the Bengaluru GCC, AI tools are deeply embedded in daily workflows. Developers use tools such as Claude, Devin, Cursor, and Gemini, while product and design teams experiment with platforms like v0, Magic Patterns, and Replit.

“One of the things we did last year was give our teams a plethora of AI tools and let them pick what works,” Viswanath says. “That comfort with AI has become a differentiator of working at Toast.”

The result has been a measurable productivity boost. Fredette also stated that new engineers now ramp up significantly faster.

“It used to take 54 days for engineers to reach their 10th code commit,” she recalls. “Now it’s closer to the low 30s.”

Rethinking Hiring

AI has also reshaped how Toast hires talent. While fundamentals still matter, the company increasingly looks for candidates who are open to learning and adopting AI.

“What we most want to assess is the appetite for AI,” Viswanath says. “If someone comes in with the mindset that AI is not good for us, that’s a big blocker.”

Fredette adds that traditional interview problems are being rethought. “We’re starting to design interview problems where you can’t succeed without AI,” he says. “If you don’t use AI, you might get 5% of the way there. With basic AI, maybe 50%. With advanced tools, you go much further.”

Campus hiring remains nascent but is growing. Toast has begun recruiting from top NITs and plans to expand to IITs and potentially tier-2 institutions in the coming years.

Building Toward Agentic Products

While Toast does not yet view AI agents as “employees”—a line companies including McKinsey and LTIMindtree have increasingly blurred—it is steadily moving toward more autonomous systems, particularly through Toast IQ, its AI assistant platform.

“I wouldn’t even call it an agent yet,” Fredette clarifies. “But it’s the foundation.”

Product teams across geographies, including India, are now building tools and actions that plug into Toast IQ. Over time, this could evolve into a network of specialised agents—bookkeeping, marketing, and scheduling—coordinated through a single interface.

“That’s a hard engineering problem,” Fredette admits. “Permissions, trust, coordination—we’re not there yet. But that’s where the world is going.”

Growth Without Shrinking Ambition

Despite AI productivity gains, Toast does not see automation as a reason to slow hiring.

“If teams can go twice as fast, you still have the same strategic choices,” Fredette says. “You can do more, or you can go faster—but focus still matters.”

Toast plans to continue expanding its India workforce, with hundreds of hires expected over time, as the GCC cements its role as a core innovation hub.

“We’re not stopping headcount growth,” he asserts. “We’re investing in productivity so we can do more.”