Name: AI and small business: 5 game-changing uses in 2026
Uploaded: 2026-02-18T20:35:41.794Z
Duration: 58 min 56 s
Description: AI and small business: 5 game-changing uses in 2026

Transcript for "AI and small business: 5 game-changing uses in 2026": Oh, New York. Welcome, everyone. While you put that in there, I'll also provide a couple quick housekeeping notes. So please feel free to submit questions anytime using the QA box that's also on that right hand side of your screen. We'll be doing our best to answer questions directly in the chat during the session, and then we'll also save some time at the end to answer a few questions live. And then another quick note, you will receive the webinar recording and some related resources, so look out for that in a follow-up email afterwards. I see Ian from Irvine. Welcome, Ian. I see Carrie from Rockport. Alright. Welcome, you guys. Lots of great engagement in the chat. Love to see it. But let's move right along. We're gonna kick things off with a little poll today. So take a look over to the right hand side of your screen, and go ahead and let us know in that poll tab how much are you leveraging AI in your business today. So would you say that you're just getting started, sort of dipping your toe in, but haven't made a full effort yet? Are you leveraging it quite a bit, mostly using those general models, though? So your chat GPT, your Gemini, your Claude. Would you say you're using it moderately moderately? Maybe those general models plus some other tools, or maybe AI is integrated throughout most of your workflows. Let's see. I'm seeing a lot of answer b. I would say that among the sellers that I talk to here at Square, we do see a lot of answer b as well. A lot of folks have been experimenting with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude and seeing a bunch of real wins there, but not seeing as much of those power users yet. So let's give one more second for everyone to get your responses in in that poll tab. And now let's transition over to the results that we're seeing. Alright. Let's see those results here on the view. So we are seeing a lot of that response b. So mostly those general models, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. But really wherever you fall on this spectrum, you are definitely in the right place today. To sort of talk through what we'll be covering, we'll be talking through the top five ways you should be testing into AI this year to drive real impact in your business. So I know there's a lot of content out there about the history of AI, how it works, maybe its limitations, some misconceptions, And we will share some helpful resources in that docs tab that you see on the right, as well as after the webinar if you wanna dig deeper into that information. But today, we really wanna make the most of our time together by diving right into the what the data is telling us and covering those top five areas business owners are seeing the highest ROI. We'll also hear directly from some AI powered users on the gains that they're achieving and the tools that they're using to get there. So with that, let me introduce you to the team today. I'm Samantha from the Square product marketing team, and I'm focused on our AI solutions here. With me today are two fantastic Square sellers. We have Gary Thomas, owner and CEO of Keva Juice, who operates 10 locations across Nevada and Colorado. And we have Donnie McClanahan, who owns and operates five cafes across Knoxville, Tennessee. Love to have you here today, Gary and Donnie. Thanks for being here. It's great to be here. Yes. Thank you for putting this on today. Awesome. Thank you, guys. Gary and Donnie are both on the forefront when it comes to implementing AI to drive business efficiency and really looking forward to hearing more from you guys today. So let's move on into the next slide. So first off, why is AI so important for small business owners right now? We've all seen the constant buzz about AI over the last couple of years, but Square just wrapped up a survey of almost 2,000 business owners. And here's what the data is saying. So over three quarters are using AI in their business today, and among those, 70% of survey respondents have increased that usage over the past year. Now this is compared to about 99% using AI when you look at those Fortune 500 companies. So while it's really promising progress, it also shows that about a quarter of small business owners could be dipping their toes in more, could be doing more to take advantage of the efficiencies that AI affords, and to really better compete with those big brands, which I know is a big challenge out there today. And then among small businesses leveraging AI, over 90% are reporting productivity gains, but just over three quarters are reporting real measurable return on investment, which also shows us that's great. Right? That's a solid baseline, but there is some room for better education on where you should be focusing your efforts with AI and exactly how to do that in order to see those biggest gains. So moving on, based on the survey data and hundreds of conversations with Square business owners seeing real success with AI, these are the five focus areas we'll cover today, each one with specific tips, tools, and stories from our sellers. So we'll cover using AI for business research, content generation, automating your operations, customer service, and data analysis. So let's dive right into the first one. Alright. The first area where 55% of our survey respondents are seeing value in AI is for that more general business research. We have a quote here on the right side of the slide from Square seller Ryan Prowitz, who owns Vines and Rush's winery. And I really love this quote because as small business owners and operators, you're either wearing dozen hats on any given day or you're having to hire out for certain tasks. And, of course, both of those come at a high cost, whether it's money or time. And that can take you away from focusing on parts of your business that you find most fulfilling and the parts that also really drive growth. Because AI can analyze and summarize across massive data datasets, it can be more effective than your traditional search engines when it comes to researching and learning how to tackle those different operational parts of your business that require sort of specialized expertise. We at Square hear a lot from sellers turning to the general LLM tools for this type of research. So ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. And I do want to caveat that AI outputs should be used as a starting point and never as a full replacement for legal, financial, medical advice. But we do see a lot of business owners seeing real success having AI review their legal documents, help them stay up to date on the latest HR policies, feeding it HR scenarios and getting advice back, you know, monitoring industry trends and vetting new ideas, and even for things like comparing vendors and business tools. So let's hear from our sellers. Gary, let's start with you first. What are some of the highest impact ways that you've been able to use AI to sort of research, fill knowledge gaps, and spend less time overall doing that? Thanks, Samantha. And I am excited to be here today talking with you and everyone about this topic. I meet with business owners regularly, and many of them are intimidated about how quickly AI is taking off. And I'm here to show you that even though there might be a learning curve, taking the first step will save you tens of thousands of steps over the long run. AI in our business has been an absolute game changer in all areas of the business that previous required us to go out and get expert help. And from a legal standpoint, when you look at things like contracts, we use ChatGPT to analyze all of our contracts and leases because it can break everything down just like we were a fifth grader. And, you know, when we were recently when we've been negotiating a lease for a new location, CHAT GPT helped us identify that we were responsible for the maintenance costs on all of the refrigeration units and the infrastructure on their building. And even though these units were nearing twenty years old, the cost of these units have gone up by tens of thousands of dollars. And because of what was able to point out, we may not have recognized those clauses without putting those leases into ChatGPT. And so we were able to use that information to renegotiate our leases. When it comes to HR policies, AI has really helped us keep on top of all of the changes on a regular basis and to update our employee handbooks accordingly, especially since our organization runs, we run-in multiple states. One of the most exciting things, though, is in business planning. Our biggest research application lately has had to do with launching a new business. And we've been running a Berry Bouquet business on the side for years. And AI has helped us analyze the current data in Square, build a business plan, source packaging and transform it into a full blown business in just under four weeks. Amazing. Thank you for sharing that, Gary. And I'm really excited to learn more about your new business, which we'll get into later on in some of the other sections. Donnie, what about on your side? How has AI come into play for business research? Well, like Gary, I'm excited to be here today and to provide, you know, the examples that I have personally used with AI in my business, and it's helped take us to new heights. When it comes to research, I also use some of the general models like ChatGPT and Claude to figure out, you know, where I should be investing my time and resources this year in 2026. So one of the things I was doing was expansion modeling because I have five cafes that I manage here in Knoxville and also run a company that provides, you know, also vending and food service to office buildings and business to business services. We were considered expanding into day care food service. Well, after pasting all the data and the various factors into AI, the model helped me be able to pick it quickly access quickly assess that while we could make it profitable, there was a bigger upside to doubling down on some of my existing locations, adding additional kiosks to increase order throughput there. Now before AI, this type of scenario modeling would have taken me weeks. Now in a matter of quickly back and forth conversation, I can move forward confidently with my business plans and know that I'm investing in all the right areas to maximize return this year. Another big area is trend monitoring. AI is great at research and trend monitoring in the food service industry because trends pop up, tastes change so frequently. AI makes it much faster to look at what's going on. So I use it to research the latest culinary trends, and then I try to layer on the factors like my location and the demographic I serve to come up with new dishes that keep my menus fresh and and appealing. Thank you both for sharing those really detailed examples. I think these are the types of things folks watching can immediately go and try out today if they haven't yet. And what you guys are always seeing on the right side of these slides here are visuals from Gary and Johnny of exactly how they're enacting these examples. So you'll continue to see that throughout. Let's get into our second AI use case. So based on our survey results, content generation is one of the largest applications of AI that small business owners are testing into with 60% having tried it and seen value. They're using AI to generate customer facing content. So think of things like campaign images and messaging, item images for selling online, and also to generate internal messaging. So things like employee handbooks, policy docs, SOPs, and lots more. The general models can be highly useful for content generation, but here, we're sort of increasingly seeing AI built into other marketing tools that you already use. So it's more directly integrated into your workflows. So that can be everything from Canva to Square marketing to a tool called Manus, which we'll hear more about in a second from Gary. Donnie, let's go back to you first. What are some of the biggest ways AI has helped you with generating content, and which tools are you using most often here? I use ChatGPT and Gemini, and Square to generate my customer facing content. Square has built the AI into the product directly so I can generate item descriptions, which give me a great starting point for new menu items that I can then tweak to save time. Sometimes I'll use ChatGPT and Gemini to generate item images. If I haven't had a chance to photograph the item, I'll prompt both of the tools and then select whichever one I think is better. Recently, used ChatGPT to create a flyer we put up on our windows so we were to announce we were closed for Martin Luther King Day. And the flyers announced when it was an employee's birthday at another location. And I might have not have had the time or taken the time to create those types of communications without AI. But with it, they're done in a matter of minutes. So I've also used ChatGPT and Claude to create internal policy docs. As an independent operator, you know, our SOPs are so important. And before AI, I had to download a generic template and then spend tons of time tailoring them to our business. Let's say I wanna create a standard recipe for making a new sandwich on my menu. I just use voice control and talk to ChatGPT through the steps and I ask it to format it into an SOP for the crew. I can even give it examples of SOPs from big franchises that I like and ask it to follow that format. Then I can spend a couple of minutes tweaking it to my liking and that easily reduces forty five minute process down to ten minutes or less. That's incredible to hear, Donnie. And you guys are seeing an example of one of those SOPs for a recipe that Donnie created in the format of a big franchise model that he enjoyed right here on the slide. This is definitely in line with what I've been hearing from other Square sellers about the time that AI is saving them. Gary, let's hear from you next. I know at Keva Juice, you're really big on AI customer facing content. Where are you seeing the most success there? Yeah. So, great question. We're at the point where the majority of our customer facing content is aided by AI. And I'll use a recent product launch as an example. Like Donnie mentioned, trends change fast. And And as we all know, protein has been trending for a while. We at Kiva have offered we've offered protein for twenty years. And using Square AI, we were able to validate that the pro that protein was the number one supplement added to our smoothies by a factor of 20 to one. But we'd never really done a great job marketing it or telling the story. So in q four of this year, we launched a new line of protein smoothies that tastes amazing. And using AI, we overhauled our website and prepared a whole marketing campaign that launched January 1. So something like this would have taken us months to prepare in the past, but we were able to complete this in less than five days. So talking about some of the tools that we used, we used ChatGPT to help come up with the plan and generate copy and images. We used Canva to plug those into marketing templates. And we used an AI platform called Manus that we integrate with our Square online website and all of the SEO to totally overhaul our kiva.com homepage which is hosted by Square putting the Protein campaign front and center. That is awesome to hear how AI sort of played a role through the entire process from the data analysis that led you to launch a new product line, all the way through to how it shows up for your customers. So here on the right, you can see the fully AI generated homepage that Gary spoke about with the copy and images that he leveraged AI to aid in generating of that new protein line. Definitely recommend checking out his website, kiva.com, for all of the latest seasonal updates that, as Gary spoke about, are fully AI powered today. So let's get into the third AI use case where business owners are finding real value. This one may not be as stunning and sharp to look at, but it's just as important, automating operational tasks with 52 of our survey respondents saying that they've seen real value here so far. So business owners are using AI to streamline things like hiring, whether that's writing the job descriptions or vetting the candidates, crafting better schedules for their teams, prepping for meetings, taking notes during those meetings, and summarizing those notes, and so much more. Gary, what are some of the most impactful tasks you've been able to automate with AI? Yeah. Automations are are huge. I mentioned at the beginning that we recently expanded our berry bouquet business from something that we just ran at farmer's markets and pop up events to a full blown business available online for pickup and delivery. When you're getting hundreds of orders a day, it can be incredibly complex to calculate how much of each fruit you need to have in the stock and how much you need to cut, prep, how many strawberries you need to dip. And so we created a script in Manus that analyzes all of the orders coming in through our email, leverages ChatGPT to translate that into how much of each product to prep, and sends the team a daily summary via Gmail on the execution plan for that day. Without these tools, this would have been a full time job that we would have needed to staff for. Zapier is also a huge tool that we use that integrates with Square. And using Zapier and AI, we've created an automation that monitors the readings on our freezer on our temperature probes in our freezers. It sends the team a printout to our Square POS system if the temperature gets too high or too low so that they can address it immediately. And this one automation has saved us tens of thousands of dollars, in just potential product loss this past year. Things like this may sound small, but it helps us avoid urgent file drills, taking constant worry out of the equation, and giving us back valuable time that we can focus on moving our business forward. These are such strong and specific examples, Gary. Things like automatic emails and freezer monitors may not sound the jazziest, but I'm sure all of the business owners on the call can I really identify with how important these things are in saving time and money? So here on the slide is an example of the output of that daily email that Gary's team gets around how many ingredients to prep for those berry bouquets. Donnie, what about you? Where are you using AI to automate some of those more admin type tasks? Well, similar to Gary, we've used AI to integrate various systems to save time. We use Square for our point of sale, but currently we also have kiosks that are powered by another provider. And we've set up a webhook that uses the Square developer tools to automatically pull those category sales each night. It transfers it over to a spreadsheet that's specially formatted for the other kiosk provider, and it's ready to upload the next morning. You know, these were two dissimilar systems and we actually used AI to integrate inventory across two platforms so we don't have to reconcile it manually. And we started that process by simply going to the AI and actually saying, hey, this is what I wanna do. And we let the AI help guide us also, not just make the tools we needed. Cost tracking is another big area with restaurants and small business. One of the other bigger time savers that we've done is I've used Cloud AI and set up a project inside of Cloud AI. It's a very powerful tool that everybody has access to where I can import quick photos of our invoices or PDFs of our invoices, and it'll automatically flag ingredient prices that have changed more than 3%, which that prompts for me to evaluate whether I need to change my prices to preserve our margins. You know, before this, it had taken me thirty minutes a week to sit down and compare those invoices. So the result was that I only not only did I do it only did it monthly or quarterly and I didn't catch price changes till they were big, this has translated into saving me time and the dollar value as well because I can react so quickly. We found that adding additional triggers is super easy once you have it set up. I can ask it what did I spend on the most on this month. Was it fajita chicken strips or did it fryer oil? And it'll give me a list of those top five items by cost, and I can focus on those items. Pennies are important in business, but in the restaurant business, often we will step over dollars to pick up quarters. I recently started testing out Square's new order guide as a way to compare invoices from different providers as well, which has helped automate that process even further, and I'm plugging in my Square data directly right there. Yeah. Love to hear that, Donnie. Here on the right, you guys can see a visual of Donnie's Claude project where he's uploaded those photos or PDFs of his invoices, and then it's automatically flagged a large price increase in liquid eggs as well as other pricing trends he should be aware of and be able to act on more quickly. While external tools like Claude, which he's using here, can be integral in automating operations, I did wanna share a bit more with you all about OrderGuide, which Donnie just mentioned, which takes this same process and brings it all together inside Square. So next slide, we'll get a little visual of that. So order guide is an AI powered procurement tool that allows Square sellers to upload price sheets from their vendors. It then translates those into standardized price per unit and helps you compare prices across vendors side by side to achieve the best prices and protect margins when you're doing those ingredient purchases. Order guide launched in October as part of Square releases, so you can check there or even search order guide on the Square Support Center for more info. And you can see those links in the docs tab to the right of the webinar screen as well. So now let's move into our fourth AI use case, direct interactions with customers. 41% of our survey respondents say that they've tried this out, leveraging AI to respond to customer questions and reviews, take orders, generate quotes, manage appointments, and more using lots of specialized tools. Donnie, what are some things that you're thinking about testing into here? Well, this is one of the areas where I'm just beginning to scratch the surface of what's possible with AI. The kiosk I mentioned that we use in a couple of our cafes and something I know Square and other kiosk providers are working on is a more personalized ordering experience, where the kiosk will recommend add ons and do up sales based on customer ordering history. Rather than having to train cashiers to up sell items, this will be automatic. Another big area that I've working on right now is Square's voice ordering. Square offers an AI powered voice ordering system, which is where a voice assistant can answer menu questions and take pickup orders over the phone. So I'm in the process of doing some menu cleanup in Square with my catalog that allow me to test this out, which I'm really, really excited about. And my staff is excited because they don't like to answer the phone in the middle of lunch if they don't have to. Thanks, Donnie. And just pointing out the visual here on the slide is that voice ordering tool from Square. This also launched in beta last year and helps restaurant owners answer customer questions and take orders over the phone so that they never miss a sale even during those peak hours that Donnie just spoke about. Let's pop over to you, Gary. Are you seeing success so far with AI for customer facing interactions? Yeah. Great question, Samantha. You were testing AI voice ordering from Square. And while we don't receive too many orders over the phone so far, it's performing really well, when we do receive the orders. And the thing about voice ordering for us is it really is about having that plan b scenario where maybe the store is just so busy they can't get to the phone. Things do happen, and and we really wanna meet our our customers on their term. So what we've done is we've set up a Zapier automation. So if a customer hangs up on Voice AI, a printout will come through the Square register and the store prompting the team to call the customer back. Another area where we've seen success using Zapier Agent is to automatically respond to Google reviews. Now I know what some business owners are thinking. Many business owners worry about losing their brand voice or authenticity with AI, but we found that it's incredible about learning and adapting to your preferred tone over time. So it's able to come up with responses that sound specific and organic. So when a customer leaves a five star review, it thanks them, responds to their specific callouts and encourages them to sign up to our loyalty program. When we get a poor review, it can apologize, respond to their complaints and point them to the right directions to speak with us to really get things resolved for them. That's awesome. Thank you both for sharing. And I do know that direct interactions with customers can be a trickier one to test into because preserving that excellent standard of service is paramount for any business. And to both of your point, some business owners worry about preserving that authenticity. What we've actually been hearing across all of our conversations here at Square is that a lot of business owners are seeing real success leveraging AI to power those more basic or straightforward customer interactions and actually provide better, faster service there while still offering a path to be connected with a real human during business hours for those more complex, high touch, personalized interactions. So it's not about replacing the human touch, but providing a quicker path during those times when human touch is not available. And now for our final category, we'll move into AI for data analysis, which 59% of survey respondents report doing today. While it can be incredibly valuable to export and paste your data into a more general model to do the analysis, it does save time if the platform that already houses your business data has those AI tools directly built in, both for efficiency and security reasons. So Square launched Square AI last year, making it easy for sellers to ask questions about their data and get a quick clear answer without even having to hunt down the right report, set filters, or, you know, export and combine various datasets. So, Gary, let's hop back to you. You've used Square AI really robustly over the past year or so since. it was launched. What's one of your favorite outcomes? Yeah. So absolutely, Samantha. I you know, I spoke, I spoke at Square releases in New York last fall about how Square AI helped me cut costs and boost revenue. And we've always done frequent analysis on our best and worst selling items, to inform menu updates, and Square AI has made it radically easier. When we look at our top selling seasonal items, we learned that our fresh pumpkin smoothies in the fall blew all the others out of the water. Because we had gotten to the insight so quickly, we were able to launch the pumpkin smoothies a month earlier and added a second pumpkin smoothie to the menu and ordered our fresh pumpkin in bulk much earlier in the season, allowing us to secure a lower price than we would have normally done. So the quick decision for us led to a $0.02 $5,000,000 in increase in revenue for all of our locations for that period, which was awesome. Amazing, Gary. I love hearing such a strong story about how clear access to data leads to real growth opportunities that you always had access to, but may not have noticed otherwise. What about you, Donnie? What's your favorite Square AI outcome? I have so many now that we've been using it for several months, but Square AI has enabled me to reduce costs. That's a big thing in any business. And it's helped me prevent it's prevented me from making the wrong decisions at times. We're looking to streamline I was looking to streamline my lunch menu and I had a hunch that a quesadilla and wraps that weren't selling as well as other categories like my chicken and burgers. A quick conversation with Square AI not only dis proved that theory but led me to discover that the patty melt was a very low performer and was the only menu item that used Thousand Island dressing. So based on those insights, I turned the patty melt from just a constant menu item into a recurring special. So it's now a limited time offering, which improved my sales on my other burgers and helped streamline the ingredient ordering. Similar conversation with Square Eye, and I've been able to notice increasing labor and overtime costs and take measures to reduce those and adjust store hours in a way that I could decrease costs without impacting the customer experience. It's like being able to have a conversation directly with your business and I think that's one of the things that AI allows us to do is to just talk to our numbers and find out what information we need with that conversation. Yeah. That's really on the nose, Donnie. And all of these stories are super in line with what we've been hearing from other sellers using Square AI too, even in this early beta stage that it's been in. Not only does it save time on the reporting that you've always done, but it opens up the opportunity to dig into new data and inform new growth avenues. So look out for much more to come very soon on Square AI's capabilities for all of you that have tried it to really be more proactive and truly automate some of your most time consuming tasks. So that was the last of our five areas that we really wanted to dig into and hear from Gary and Donnie on today. So to bring us home, we know that coming into this, almost all of you probably thought of AI as a tool that you should be taking advantage of more in your business no matter where you landed on that initial poll. But you may have been a little bit overwhelmed about where to start or just nervous wasting time learning things that don't drive real outcomes quickly. So we hope that the way we've structured this and this data from other business owners and those detailed examples from Gary and Donnie have left you with at least a couple of AI experiments that you're excited to go try in some of these top five areas. So we're really excited to hear from you about what you accomplished. I'd love to hear from you in the chat too. What was one thing that you learned about today that you're most excited to go out and try? And then before we get into some q and a, I do have a question for both of our panelists today. Gary, Donnie, what's your one biggest piece of advice for other business owners looking to apply AI more effectively? And Gary, we'll go with you first. You know, I I would say, the biggest advice would be just to to really get curious about your business. The journey of a thousand steps thousand miles begins with that first step. And the more curious you get, it's kinda like a ball of string. It leads you to asking different questions and almost like building a relationship. And it'll learn over time. It'll actually improve over time. So just getting curious and beginning with that first step. And it's it's been an amazing journey for us in in the the time that we've used it. That's solid advice. And I'd love to see how you guys have continuously incorporated AI throughout every single part of your business and your workflows over the last couple of years. Donnie, what about you? What's your one biggest piece of advice? I will say what I've told a lot of the people that work for me. Just use it. You really have to get out there and just take a few minutes, sit down, and start playing around with whether it's ChatGPT, Cloud AI, Gemini, or or Square AI. Square AI is probably I wouldn't start exactly there because Square AI is very secure. They built it to keep your data very safe behind it. So I know a lot of comments in the chat, people are asking about security and things. And a Square is forward thinking on that. I can tell you because I've tried to break it every way I can, and it's I've not been able to do it. But the big advice I have is just talk to the AI like you would somebody you want advice from. Give it lots of detail. Give it lots of information. Give it too much information. And then just sit back and take a moment and read it. But always realize that no matter how good the AI is, you're the human in the middle. And that's what takes it from being mistake driven to being something you can actually use because you are still in control of what you do. But just talk to it. Absolutely. And I'm seeing some comments reflecting that in the chat, you guys. The only way to learn is to just get started and start gradually getting comfortable. So I think that's so powerful, Donnie, and so helpful. We'll get into some of the q and a questions that we've received throughout the session now. So I lot I saw a lot of comments in the chat about things to be careful with. So we covered AI for business research today, and we gave some legal examples. We gave some HR examples. Obviously, AI should never be a full replacement for things like legal advice. But let's get into that. Right? So we got a question. What are some of the risks of AI, and how are our business owners hedging against those? That's a great question. And I can speak to this a little bit from the many conversations I've had with Square. So for all the strengths of AI and the powerful use cases we covered today, there are, of course, some limitations to be aware of. First thing is trust. It's a common concern we hear about. AI is only as good as the content it's trained on. So even though it can consume massive datasets to land on the right answer, some of that content itself could always be out of date or incorrect. And at the end of the day, AI is optimized to produce content that looks right. It doesn't have the practical experience or the common sense that you and I have. So it should always be used as a starting point, but the content should always be reviewed and edited with a critical eye by a human. You are the final decision maker, and AI should never be that full replacement. And I saw a lot of you making really valuable statements about that in the chat that were definitely correct. Another common concern we hear is around privacy. So is my business data safe when using AI? So what I can say here is that while reputable AI tools out there are built with privacy and security in mind, we always recommend reviewing the privacy policy of any provider you use for business purposes. So for example, chat GPT's lower tier plans require explicit opt out to ensure that your conversations are not used to train future models, while its higher tier business plans sort of disable model training by default and come with higher compliance standards that are more suitable for use with confidential data. Very similarly, SquareAI tools follow stringent privacy policy where your business data is never shared with third party Very providers. It's never even stored. It has a zero day retention policy. One of the other big concerns we hear Square's that I saw popping up in the chat is cost. So while business plans for ChatGPT and some of the other tools do come at a cost, we're starting to increasingly see AI tools that cater to small business needs and are integrated directly into the platforms you already use at no additional fee. SquareAI, our chat assistant, is an example of that today. It is most useful for Square sellers as it's built directly into the Square dashboard where you manage your whole business on Square, but it comes at no additional fee today. There is always an element of cost benefit analysis there. But with the proliferation of free or lower cost AI tools today, you can try many of the applications we covered in this session at little or no added cost. And then the last one I'll mention today is environmental concerns. So there is obviously immense computational power required to train AI models and maintain data centers, which then translates to water and electricity usage. So you definitely want to be evaluating service providers not only on their effectiveness for your business, but also on their environmental policies. You know, some AI tools out there prioritize energy efficient data centers or carbon offset programs. So I think this is one area that's a lot easier said than done. But you can sort of, like, vote with your dollar there and analyze tools you're using based on those policies as well. Donnie, Gary, I wanna open it up for you guys for any thoughts on how you thought about these risk areas with AI. Maybe Donnie, if you have any thoughts, you can go first. Some of the comments I saw in the chat are very valid. AI is a new tool. It's evolving very quickly. And anytime you're feeding your information to another service provider, you know, there is some risk that's always involved with that. So I really appreciate Square's AI. Not to be a fanboy for Square, but they really have thought about the security first. One of the comments I saw was about, Square AI being a bit slower. And I think that's a lot because of the security. It's getting much better over time, and it will continue to get better just like AI has. So privacy, I think, is one of the bigger concerns that people bring up and it's a very valid point. It's something that we deal with. It's the problem that I see with a lot of that is that if you don't embrace and use it, your competition will. Yeah. So true. I think that's a solid take, Donnie. So we can move into some of our other q and a questions here. I'm just looking through the list. We got a question around what's coming next for Square's AI tools, so I can give a little sneak peek into that. So here at Square, the AI tools that I covered today from the chat assistant to order guide and voice ordering are all rooted in the mission of giving time back because what's more valuable to you than extra time. So that time can be repurposed towards the decisions that actually drive growth for your business and maybe even the parts of the business that bring you more joy and fulfillment than all of those admin tasks. So today, Square AI, our chat assistant that's built into Square dashboard, powers easier data analysis, automatic cost comparison. It does power some customer interactions with the voice ordering. And then we have tools built throughout that power easier onboarding to Square and faster help as well. While I can't give too too much away, I can say that these capabilities will radically expand as soon as later this month. We're really pushing to bring business owners more proactive insights and suggestions without you having to prompt or ask the tool. So really moving away from that standard back and forth chatbot interface to provide more proactive proactive insights and take on some of your most time consuming works workflows for you. So I can say that there's much more to come there. I think we have time for about one more question. We did get a lot of questions around cost. So for Gary and Donnie, folks are curious if you guys are only using paid AI tools and sort of how you're approaching that cost benefit analysis of adopting new AI tools for your business. Gary, did you have any thoughts you wanted to share there? Yeah. So we do we do pay for all of the pro versions of, ChatGPT. We pay for Canva. We pay for Manus. The way that we look at it is that the these AI models are allowing small business owners to tap into billions of dollars in technology that only major companies have been able to access. And so for us, when you're looking at the upswing of hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential sales, You're looking at SEO optimization on your website and being able to look at it and save thousands of dollars from having to spend money on Google Ads. Or in this case, with HR modeling, being able to save $7,000 this year by eliminating our HR pro software because we're able to do it internally, it's well worth the investment on every part. And the last piece of it is giving you as the business owner time back. So where you normally, you're spending forty, fifty hours a week, sixty, eighty hours a week. Maybe you can do things in thirty hours a week, spend more time with your family, go on a vacation, and let these automations do what they can do to give you that quality of life back. And I can honestly see, you know, a time where, you know, maybe the thirty hour work week becomes normal. I know a lot of people would laugh at that, but we see the path in helping us get there and give time back. Yeah. Thank you for expanding on that, Gary. And the way that we structured this session today is hopefully really actionable for you guys to go out and see some of those use cases where business owners are already seeing that return on investment and have already done that cost benefit analysis and are sharing out on it. But like I said earlier, we are increasingly seeing very cost effective, low cost, or free AI tools that are directly built into some of the tools you're already using. So maybe your marketing tools, your Canva plan, Square has AI built in. So I think there's plenty for you to go out and try here from what we covered today at low or no cost, and then continue building from there as Gary and Donny have done. I am seeing even more good questions that are quick, so we'll sneak a couple more in. Can Square AI tell me what items are struggling on my menu so I can get rid of them? Yes. Today, Square AI, the chat assistant that we have, can answer questions on your business data, including sales data, transactions data, customers data, team, like, so staff performance data, as well as help questions. So that is a big use case that we see business owners having success with with Square AI today is better understanding of your best performers on your menu or your catalog if you're not a food and beverage business, your services, and also your bottom performers. So that was exactly Gary's example of identifying a top seasonal performer that he might not have identified as early on and being able to use that to secure lower ingredient costs and make decisions that boosted seasonal revenue. Another question I'm seeing is, can the panelists discuss more of AI's use for creative output? So posters, menus, social media, and then a connected question, someone is asking how they can use AI tools to refresh content on their website on a regular basis. I'd. love to turn this one back to you, Gary. You are using AI for almost all of your marketing materials in some way. Can you walk us a little bit through that process of everything from, you know, generating a simple image for a. new item to powering your whole website? Yes. So we will use, we'll use ChatGPT to come up with an idea. Like, we'll have the idea, and then we'll use ChatGPT to come up with the inspiration. So, you know, in the case of the protein smoothies, we had the inspiration of of what we wanted, and we actually looked online on some very effective things that our competitors were doing. And then we we imported our brand voice into that to generate the content. So ChatGPT does an incredible job of you saying, hey. This is what I want it to look like. Can you make it my brand voice? Once you have that, we will use Canva, which is an incredible and inexpensive graphics design software to design all of the layouts and all of the different social media posts, posters, menu updates. It does an incredible job in doing that. When it comes to SEO optimization, that's where we use Manus to to go in and take a look at our website, to scan the website, to look at the back end and what's working. And then what it will do is it will develop what's called JSON scripting, which you can embed directly into Square to optimize your Google searches. And Manus has done an incredible job at giving us blind spots that where where customers normally wouldn't have found us. So our main business is smoothies. When somebody types smoothie near me, smoothies near me, juice bar near me, whatever item they're looking for to find your business in your city, it really, gave us that code that we were able to embed into Square to and that's what saved us thousands of dollars on Google Ads. And we've all but almost eliminated all of our Google advertising because of Manus and because of the way it's been able to help improve the SEO. Hope that answered the question, Sam. Yeah. That's great. No. Thank you for walking through that. You are using AI across so many external customer facing applications, and definitely recommend everyone checking out of more more of what Gary is doing on kiva.com and their social channels and their responses to reviews, everything that we covered today. Another big question that I'm seeing is around using AI to inform your staffing and labor costs. Donnie and Gary, I know this is something that both of you have done. Maybe we'll go to Donnie first. How are you using AI to inform better staffing and scheduling and sort of flex that based on better predictions of your order volume? Well, again, that's like I used Claude to do a lot of invoice analysis. We'll also look at hourly sales, which Square has that data there. And I'll take those hourly sales and output them to a spreadsheet. And we kind of try to start tracking those over time especially with the weather. You know, there's a lot of different factors that affect, you know, the restaurant industry and affect any business for that matter. So we use those to try to make sure we have the right number of people for the right times. Ultimately, a lot of this with what we use AI for is to optimize our business. We're not using it in any way to replace people. We're using it to actually fill in the holes where we just can't find that right person for it. And like in one of my cafes, we reduced a person there and sent them to another store. And, you know, the staff that were at that location by changing some of our we saw that standard operating procedures. We even used AI to make sure we wrote out more of those for consistency. They were able to reduce one staff member normally there during the day, and their actual tip shares from that location went up. So they actually let me use AI to help give them a raise effectively doing that. So they had some buy in for that also, and then I get the benefit of having more quality product going out because we've standardized it. But, you know, there's a lot of different ways with labor and training to optimize that with AI. One of the biggest problems with with staffing and overtime and things that is that we know as business owners, we need to work on those things and we don't. So AI is kinda helping me jump over that hump of it's better to do something than to wait and do nothing because perfectionism is the thief of progress. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you for getting into the details on what you're doing there, Donnie. Gary, did you have anything to add on how you're using AI to optimize labor and staffing? Yeah. So we're we're really, digging into this year. You know, our business, we have a code. We call it the Kiva code, which is our financial operating model. And we've used, Square and ChatGPT to determine things like, you know, are we opening too early? Are we closing too late? You know, are stores open at 7AM? Is it worth us open at 7AM? We're also looking in things a lot of our employees are tipped employees using. artificial intelligence to really determine retention rates on doing things like daily tip payouts versus weekly payouts on credit card tip pooling in the in our within our within our stores. And so we this is something that we are really, really getting into, but most of it has to do with the most optimal number of team members to deliver the the level of customer service that our that our customers deserve and while at the same time providing a great in experience for our team. So so, yes, absolutely, we're we're we definitely use it for that. Thank you both for digging in there. And I know you're both using Square AI for that labor optimization as well as other tools and analyses. I'll take one final question here at the end. Someone was asking for examples and usage studies outside of the food industry. So just wanted to clarify all of the survey data we covered today was across many business types that Square serves. So food and beverage, retail, health and beauty, services, all types of business were captured by the data we shared today. And then while our two lovely panelists are in the food and beverage industry, I wanna direct you guys to the docs resources here on the side of the screen again. If you wanna click into that second link, we have a whole resource hub about sort of Square AI success stories and videos of from all different business types, as well as resources linked there on just some of those more foundational things I mentioned, the history of AI, practices with AI that apply to any type of business. So with that, that brings us to the end of our webinar today. Thank you again so much for your time, Gary and Donnie and everyone who attended. Thank you. will see a survey open up here on the right. If you can please take a moment to fill that out, and we really use that to let us know what topics would be helpful in the future. But look out for that email afterwards. We will be sending that out via email as well as the recording and some additional resources. So take a look out for that, and we can't wait to hear from you all in the future. Have a wonderful rest of your week. Thank you so much, Thanks. everyone. Bye. Yeah. Thanks for being here.