Square's New Kiosk Talks Back, and It Wants Franchise Counters

Ask Square’s new kiosk whether a dish is vegetarian, and it answers out loud.

Block’s Square launched Square Kiosk on Oct. 14, a 21.5-inch touchscreen ordering station built on what the company calls “an agentic, conversational voice layer that fully understands a seller’s menu.” Guests can ask questions, request modifications and substitutions, and switch between talking and tapping mid-order. The kiosk also suggests add-ons based on what is popular at that location, at that time of day, or with what is already in the cart, according to Square.

The price is $1,999 with a Square Plus or Premium subscription, plus $99 a month in software fees per device. For a franchisee buying one, that comes to about $3,190 in the first year per kiosk, before the subscription itself.

The line franchisors should read twice sits further down the announcement. Square is also rolling out a multi-account solution for QSR franchises to manage menus, reporting and gift cards “while ensuring franchisees retain the level of autonomy and flexibility they need to manage their locations.” That is a bid for the system-wide layer, not just the counter.

At least one franchisee in the release sounds sold. “I was genuinely skeptical of kiosks, but now I want to place Square Kiosks throughout our national footprint,” said Lawrence Kam, a multi-unit L&L Hawaiian BBQ franchise operator.

Square has company. A day earlier, Toast added AI scheduling tools and beta marketing agents, Fast Casual reported. The point-of-sale companies are racing to put agents on top of data they already hold, which is the argument behind our recent column, The Agent Race Is Really a Data Race. It is the opposite route from the one Pokeworks took when it built its own agent on a centralized database.

A counter kiosk only meets the customer who already walked in. Plenty of franchise revenue starts earlier: a call about a catering order, a website question at 10 p.m., a prospective franchisee asking about territories. That is the part of the funnel Revscale works on. Its AI agents are configured in natural language for whatever workflow a business can describe. Out of the box, the Voice Agent answers inbound calls and transfers to a person when needed, and the Web Chatbot Agent answers site visitors and books meetings around the clock, with that activity able to flow into a business’s existing CRM and tools.

The open question is the one every kiosk rollout runs into: whether franchisees see enough lift in ticket size to justify a monthly fee on every device.

Revscale Media is published by Revscale.