Square, the financial services platform, has announced the launch of ten new generative AI capabilities focused on customer content creation, onboarding, and setup. These new features aim to enhance the Square platform and reinvigorate its performance, as the company has faced a difficult year marked by declining revenues and growing competition.
Key Takeaway
Square has introduced ten new generative AI capabilities designed to enhance customer content creation and onboarding, including the Menu Generator for seamless menu creation. These features provide suggestions to sellers, who have the final say in approving or modifying the generated content. Square aims to reinvigorate its platform and address challenges faced during a difficult year.
Menu Generator: Empowering Restaurants with Seamless Menu Creation
One of the standout features is the Menu Generator, which enables restaurants to create a comprehensive menu on Square in just minutes. This tool proves particularly valuable for new restaurant sellers who may not have a menu ready during onboarding. With the flexibility to make changes and updates, this feature gives businesses momentum when launching operations on Square.
Despite concerns about generative AI’s unpredictability, Square emphasizes that the process is not fully automated. The AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4, provide suggestions to sellers, who have the final say in approving or modifying the generated content.
AI-Generated Email and Website Copy
Square’s new generative email copy feature creates personalized email messages to customers. With the new website copy generator, Square can generate headlines and entire blogs based on a brief text prompt. The human review process is an integral part of both features, ensuring that the generated content aligns with sellers’ business goals.
Square refrained from directly addressing concerns about search engine downranking due to AI-generated content. However, the company points to partnerships and integrations with Google as a step towards overcoming discoverability hurdles for small businesses.
Other AI Enhancements in Square’s Product Suite
In addition to the generative AI capabilities, Square has introduced several other AI-driven enhancements. These include auto-generating item descriptions for seller catalogs, auto-assigning menu items to kitchen categories and station screens in the Kitchen Display System, and auto-importing service details in the scheduling system, Appointments.
Moreover, Square has expanded its team communication and messaging features. The Square Team Communication app can now generate and send announcements to employees about new products and upcoming promotions. Square Messages, the business-customer messaging platform, has upgraded its reply generator with “sophisticated” AI responses, allowing for personalized messages with prepopulated customer names.
