Before I begin, a disclaimer. For the past few months, I have been part of a team that has been beta-testing the newly rolled-out Square AI feature. For the record, I'm a Boomer and had to be cajoled into participating. While I'm very tech-oriented, I was leery because of the often negative press and doom-saying surrounding all things "AI." In the end, I'm very glad that I decided to give it a go, because it is quickly turning into a tool I use frequently.
Square AI has a very specific and limited focus. It has been designed to give each of us a tool to get powerful insights into OUR Square data and accounts, as well as to give us a tool to quickly find help and resources that used to require searching for help documents, reading them from top to bottom, following links and more links, etc. It has been built around OUR data and Square's data, with walls to keep us out of other Square sellers' data.
Anyway, I wanted to share a success story that happened today.
I'm in the process of finalizing plans to expand and move to a new location for my ice cream shop. As part of that move (from a VERY small space currently), I want to capitalize on the fact I finally have enough space to make in-house waffle cones and bowls. Yay. But, in order to do this, I need to understand (for each month), what my daily averages, pars and maximums for their usage so that I can plan production.
I had hoped that the canned Square Item report would do the trick. But I found that because of the way I set up my items, variations, etc, I kept hitting one wall after another. So, I decided to see if Square AI could help. And, sure enough, it did. There was definitely a little trial-and-error to get to my goal. I'm still not great at crafting queries that give me the results I hope for. But, thankfully, I can use Square AI to help me do that in baby steps, refining my query as I go. Eventually, I found that this query gives me the results that I can download to a CSV and then analyze further in a spreadsheet.
What were soft serve (items) sales this month, broken down by variation and day of the month, restricted to variations with "waf" in their names?
That's the basic query. I can change the time period as I wish, of course. For now, and for my immediate needs, I can run that 12 times -- once for the past 12 months. There is probably a really cool way to word my query so that the AI can do breakdowns by month/day, as well, but I didn't want to waste the time since this is a once-and-done task.
Square AI is still in beta as it is still being refined. It can't yet see all of our data and if you try to ask for data it currently can't access, it will tell you so and also explain what it currently CAN do. But trust me when I say more and more is on its way. But it takes a lot of time to train the underlying models on how to interpret Square's data.
The goal of my post is to get a conversation going here in the general Community. Have you used Square AI at all? If so, what were your experiences with it? What roadblocks have you found, so far? What successes? Do you have questions, because if you do I and others can probably provide answers or at least ideas.
This is a tool I plan to use a lot and I'm looking forward to seeing it become even better over the coming months.
Chip A.
Square Expert & Innovator and member of the Square Champions group. (But NOT a Square employee, just a seller like you)
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