Square takes Squaremates AI agent out of beta and opens up to sellers’ own AI software
Block Inc.-owned commerce platform Square today made its Squaremates artificial intelligence business agent generally available to sellers in the U.S., after the agent entered open beta in April under the name Managerbot.
For sellers who would rather stay in the AI software they already use, Square is also offering a new command-line tool and an updated Model Context Protocol server. Running a business is “an endless string of judgment calls that are all on the owner,” said Willem Avé, global head of intelligence at Square. “We built Squaremates to help share that load,” he said.
Each seller’s agent now runs in its own secure workspace with access to cloud compute. Square said that gives it room for longer jobs. A seller could ask it to find customers who’ve lapsed over a given stretch of sales, for instance, and have it draft a discount to win them back.
A beta feature lets Squaremates build restocking orders directly on a supplier’s website, and the seller places them from there. Email access for its daily briefing is coming soon.
Fraser Thompson, who leads strategy and operations at Los Angeles-based Burgers Never Say Die LLC, put Squaremates to work on the restaurant’s house-made cheese sauce. “I dip my fries in it, I dunk my burger in it,” he said. “So I’m thinking, how are we not selling more of this stuff?”
Digging into attachment rates and customer segments showed that “our OGs, the regulars who’ve been with us since day one, love it.” The restaurant started promoting it on social media with what Thompson called “silly posts,” and he said that a few months later “we’d 12x’d our cheese sauce.”
“A lot of sellers already have an AI tool they like working in,” Avé said. The updated server, Square MCP, lets a third-party assistant answer questions about the business and make changes once the account is connected. Square CLI is aimed at sellers and developers who want to script or build on top of their accounts, and it gives their own tools and agents access to Square’s application programming interfaces.
Squaremates Apps are custom applications a seller writes with an AI coding tool and the CLI, which Square then hosts with a live connection to the seller’s business. Splitting cash tips by hours worked is one of the uses Square suggests.
Donnie McClanahan, who has four cafes around Knoxville, Tennessee, built a labor board app with the CLI and an AI coding agent. It pulls schedules and timecards from every location onto one screen. A lot of his mornings used to go to “playing catch-up just figuring out who’s where,” he said.
Sellers can try the tools at the Squaremates Tour, a run of in-person events Square kicked off recently. Apart from the features still in beta or coming soon, everything announced today is available to U.S. sellers at no additional cost. Squaremates itself is not yet available to sellers on Square’s Multi-Account Suite.
Image: Square
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