New Square AI Agent Automates Daily Tasks for Main Street Sellers

Square is now offering an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered “intelligent business agent” built into Square Dashboard to a select group of sellers in open beta.

The new Managerbot is the next evolution of the Square AI that was launched last year, and it is available in open beta to most non-franchise food and beverage, retail, and health and beauty U.S. sellers at no additional cost, Square said in a Tuesday (April 28) press release.

While Square AI answers questions and assists with single workflows, Managerbot can monitor sellers’ operations, surface insights and automate routine tasks, according to the release. The AI tool proposes an action, waits for the seller’s approval and then executes.

Because Managerbot works across the Square ecosystem and draws on the seller’s data, it can surface daily performance breakdowns by location, track sales velocity against stock levels and flag potential shortages, draft optimized staff schedules, surface targeted marketing campaign opportunities and flag catalog issues such as missing photos or descriptions, per the release.

“The best products are built in the open, shaped by the people who use them, and Managerbot is built on that same principle: it proposes, the seller decides,” Square Global Head of Product Willem Avé said in the release. “We want every small business owner to have the kind of operational intelligence that used to take an entire back-office team.”

Square launched Square AI in June, saying this conversational AI assistant could answer sellers’ questions about how to use the company’s business technology platform and about trends in their own business.

In October, Square added new intelligence capabilities to Square AI, including external weather, events, news and reviews data. The company said that when this data is merged with sellers’ own business metrics, sellers can gain insights that will inform their decisions around menus, staffing and inventory.

On April 2, Square said it partnered with inventory management platform MarketMan to develop Square Restaurant Inventory, a tool designed to give restaurants “AI-driven ingredient and recipe management within the Square platform.”

During a February earnings call, executives at Square’s parent company Block said the firm aims to use AI to move from reactive interfaces to proactive intelligence that anticipates user needs across payments, lending and commerce.

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