TL;DR:
- Square unveils 10 generative AI capabilities, focusing on customer content creation.
- These features aim to rejuvenate Square’s platform amidst a challenging year.
- Notable features include the Menu Generator for restaurants and AI-powered email and website copy.
- Human review is integral to ensure accuracy and legality of AI-generated content.
- Square addresses search engine concerns but leaves questions about algorithms unanswered.
- The AI enhancements extend beyond content generation, streamlining operations and enhancing communication.
- Saumil Mehta, Square’s head of point of sale, asserts Square’s position at the forefront of technology.
Main AI News:
Square, the financial services juggernaut, is making a bold foray into the realm of generative AI, and it’s making waves. Earlier this year, Square unveiled its plans to integrate AI features aimed at boosting retail sales. Today, Square has taken the wraps off not one, not two, but a whopping 10 generative AI capabilities. These capabilities are strategically focused on customer content creation, onboarding, and setup. Although some are exclusive to Square’s beta program, all are available for exploration right now.
This move can be seen as a concerted effort by Square and its parent company, Block, to reinvigorate the Square platform. The past year has been challenging for the company, with declining revenues from Block’s Cash App, substantial losses from the acquisition of Afterpay, and a drop in Bitcoin revenue coinciding with the cryptocurrency’s price slump. Moreover, Square is facing increased competition on multiple fronts, including formidable rivals like Fiserv’s Clover, Toast, and Stripe.
Investors are far from pleased, with Square’s stock retreating by approximately 30% in 2023. All of this unfolds as Block founder Jack Dorsey prepares to assume control from former Square head Alyssa Henry.
Square’s Answer: Generative AI
Among the noteworthy AI-powered features is the “Menu Generator,” which empowers restaurants to create a comprehensive menu on Square in a matter of minutes. This tool is particularly valuable for new restaurant sellers who may not have a menu ready during the onboarding process. Square emphasizes the flexibility it offers, allowing restaurants to make changes or updates to their menu later, once other setup tasks are completed. This capability provides valuable momentum to businesses venturing into food and drink offerings through Square.
Considering the potential pitfalls of generative AI, especially its propensity for inaccuracies, it’s reasonable to be cautious about using it to publish menus. The repercussions of gross inaccuracies could lead restaurants into legal troubles for false advertising. Square, however, ensures that the process is not entirely automated. It relies on various third-party generative AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4, and customers are given the opportunity to review and make edits before their menus go live.
Human Review: A Crucial Element
Human review is integrated into Square’s new generative email copy feature, which leverages generative AI to craft personalized email messages for customers. It’s also a key component of Square’s newly launched website copy generator, which can generate headlines and even entire blogs based on a brief text prompt.
Addressing concerns about the impact on search engine rankings, Square points to its partnerships and integrations with Google to assist small businesses in overcoming discoverability challenges. However, the company does not directly address whether its AI-generated content might run afoul of search engine algorithms.
Streamlining Operations
As part of the suite of generative AI capabilities, Square’s point-of-sale system can now auto-generate item descriptions for seller catalogs, promising significant time savings. However, similar initiatives in the e-commerce sphere, like eBay’s item description generator, have received mixed reviews. Users have expressed concerns about repetitiveness and superfluous content in AI-generated descriptions.
In response to these concerns, Square emphasizes that item descriptions generated by their tool take into account inputs from sellers, including keywords to maintain focus and guidelines for length and tone to avoid verbosity. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen if sellers will adhere to these guidelines.
Beyond generative AI, Square introduces other enhancements, such as the Kitchen Display System, which can now automatically assign menu items to kitchen categories and station screens. Appointments, Square’s scheduling system, can import service names, descriptions, durations, and prices during onboarding. Square’s core point-of-sales platform also offers suggestions to sellers based on undisclosed business insights.
Enhancing Communication
Square is not stopping at AI for content generation. Their offerings extend to communication tools as well. Square Team Communication, an addition to Square Team, the app for employee scheduling and time tracking, can now generate and send announcements to inform employees about new products and upcoming promotions. This tool provides flexibility in adjusting the topic, length, and tone of announcements. Square Messages, the business-customer messaging platform, is now equipped to suggest “sophisticated” AI responses, even allowing for personalization by prepopulating customer names. This marks an upgrade to Square Messages’ existing reply generator, which reportedly generates a whopping 450,000 messages per month.
In the words of Saumil Mehta, Square’s head of point of sale, these new generative AI capabilities position Square “at the forefront of technology.” Indeed, Square is uniquely poised to be the technology partner that facilitates the most seamless and intuitive applications of AI.
Conclusion:
Square’s adoption of generative AI represents a strategic move to rejuvenate its platform amid challenges in the financial services market. These AI capabilities, focusing on content creation, are aimed at improving user experiences and operational efficiency. By combining technology and human review, Square aims to mitigate potential inaccuracies. This step reaffirms Square’s dedication to innovation and competitiveness in the ever-evolving financial services landscape.
