The glacial collision of AI and local commerce continues. The latest comes from Block. The ever-expanding financial services player this week announced a barrage of new generative AI capabilities that span its suite. There are 10 updates in total – from merchant onboarding to content creation.
For example, Block’s flagship Square now offers a menu generator that gives restaurants the ability to build menus in minutes. Built on GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4, Square claims that restaurants can generate full menus using text prompts, though it admits that manual edits are often needed.
Similarly, a new POS tool will let SMBs generate item descriptions for their product catalogs. This can start with product data that Square already has access to, then expand with more marketing color through generative AI. The idea is to streamline this onerous task for SMBs that aren’t natural writers.
Elsewhere on the list of updates is a similarly-positioned email marketing assistant. This helps SMBs generate email copy that can be customized to carry specific attributes like topical focus and tone. This exists within a broader effort at Square for AI-generated marketing copy including things like blog posts.
Manage Expectations
Zeroing in on one attribute of the above moves, Block’s disclaimer about manual editing seems to be fairly common among the generative AI tools we’ve profiled. This is a smart play to manage expectations and not overpromise. Positioning AI as a starting point also has value to SMBs who need that spark.
Speaking of which, all these moves carry another modality that’s common to SMB-targeted gen-AI tools we’ve examined: writing assistance. For example, Web.com lets SMBs quickly generate things like page copy and even available domain names. These moves address real SMB pain points.
That last part is near the top of the list of success factors for AI integrations. As we’ve discussed on This Week in Local, we’re seeing lots of “throw it against the wall” approaches to AI. There’s nothing wrong with that… in fact, it’s necessary in the early stages of AI’s learning curve and feeling-out process.
But the downside is that this process will produce some misfires. So far, most of the AI integrations we’ve seen – everything from website writing assistants to chatbots that process incoming phone calls – seem to be thoughtfully devised. But there are also some misses… and there are bound to be more.
To the Rescue
All these AI moves are Block’s way to differentiate and resuscitate its suite of financial services following some declines. For example, its P2P payments app Cash has seen abrupt revenue declines while its BNPL app Afterpay posts big losses – all of which have dragged down Block’s stock 30 percent in 2023.
Making matters worse, Square continues to face headwinds, including a saturated supply side for merchant payment processing and financial services. That competitive field includes Stripe, Toast, and Clover among others, all fighting for an increasingly fixed pie in the maturing space.
So can AI come to the rescue? It seems to be a bit of a default patch these days, which is sometimes meaningful and sometimes a PR stunt. When looking at Block’s AI integrations, they appear to be substantive, even if somewhat scattershot. The market will take it from there and speak accordingly.
It’s also notable that all the above unfolds as Block founder Jack Dorsey is primed to retake Square’s executive leadership from current CEO Alyssa Henry. In the meantime, all the above updates are available now, though some remain in open beta. They can be seen in totality in Square’s announcement.
