Block has unveiled Managerbot, a new AI agent embedded in the Square platform that proactively monitors a seller’s business, identifies emerging problems, and proposes actionable solutions—without the seller ever having to ask a question.
The product marks the most tangible manifestation of CEO Jack Dorsey’s controversial bet that artificial intelligence can fundamentally reshape how his company operates, builds products, and serves the millions of small businesses that depend on Square to run day-to-day commerce.
In an exclusive interview with VentureBeat, Willem Avé, Block’s head of product at Square, described Managerbot as a decisive break from the company’s earlier Square AI assistant, which functioned as a reactive chatbot.
“The big shift from Square AI to Managerbot is really from reactive to proactive,” Avé said. “What that means is the primary interface is not a question box. You assign tasks to Managerbot, and that could be based on data, an insight, or a signal from your business.”
**How Managerbot Predicts, Schedules, and Creates on Its Own**
Avé outlined three core domains where Managerbot operates today: inventory forecasting, employee shift scheduling, and automated marketing campaign creation.
**Inventory Forecasting**: Managerbot continuously monitors a seller’s stock levels, sales velocity, and external signals such as weather patterns and local events, then alerts the seller when an item is about to run out—or when it should stock up ahead of anticipated demand.
**Shift Scheduling**: For a task that Avé described as “one of those interesting, very hard computer science problems” that consumes hours of a small business owner’s week, Managerbot analyzes forecasted sales data and generates optimized employee schedules that balance worker preferences with coverage needs.
**Marketing Automation**: Managerbot identifies sales trends across a seller’s catalog and automatically drafts win-back campaigns and promotional outreach targeted at a store’s best customer segments. Avé said Block is seeing “very meaningful lift” from Managerbot-generated campaigns.
**Built on Frontier Models, Powered by Block’s Agent Harness**
Managerbot runs on third-party frontier models—Avé specifically referenced Anthropic’s Sonnet and OpenAI’s GPT family—but Block’s competitive advantage lies in the “agent harness” the company has built around those models.
That harness draws heavily on Goose, Block’s open-source agent framework, and incorporates learnings from its consumer-facing Money Bot on Cash App.
The challenge specific to Square is scale and complexity. A seller running a small business might interact with hundreds of different tools across invoicing, inventory, customer management, marketing, payroll, and scheduling. Managerbot must navigate all of them coherently within a single agentic loop.
**Human-in-the-Loop: Every Write Action Requires Approval**
A critical design decision shapes every interaction: Managerbot does not autonomously execute changes to a seller’s business. Every write action—whether adjusting a shift schedule, publishing a marketing campaign, or modifying inventory—requires explicit seller approval.
To facilitate that approval, Managerbot generates visual UI previews showing exactly what will change before the seller clicks “yes.”
“We want to earn trust with sellers, so any write action is prompted to the user to approve,” Avé said.
**Dorsey Cut 4,000 Jobs in the Name of AI—This Is What the Tools Are Building**
It is impossible to evaluate Managerbot outside the context of the radical organizational surgery Block performed just weeks ago. In late February, Dorsey announced that Block would cut more than 4,000 of its roughly 10,000 employees—nearly half the workforce—explicitly citing AI as the driving rationale. Block’s stock surged more than 20% on the news.
The company’s Q4 2025 earnings report showed gross profit of $2.87 billion—up 24% year over year—and raised 2026 guidance to $12.2 billion in gross profit. Block also reported a greater than 40% increase in production code shipped per engineer since September 2025 through agentic coding tools.
Managerbot, then, is the product answer to the obvious follow-up question: if Block shed 4,000 workers in the name of intelligence tools, what exactly are those intelligence tools building?
Avé framed the product as proof of concept for Block’s entire strategic thesis. “What I like to do is show, not tell. We’re building Managerbot, which I think is one of the more advanced, maybe the most advanced, small business agent out there today.”
**Sellers Are Consolidating Onto Square—and That May Be the Real Payoff**
Perhaps the most consequential signal Avé shared was an early behavioral pattern: sellers who begin using Managerbot are voluntarily migrating more of their business operations onto the Square platform, consolidating payroll, time cards, and shift scheduling into Block’s ecosystem to feed the agent more data.
“When they start interacting with Managerbot, they want to move more of their business onto Square because they see the value,” Avé said. “They’re like, ‘I should put my payroll here. I should get time cards here. I should get my shift schedules here,’ because once all that data is in one place, they can make better decisions.”
Block’s Q4 earnings already showed Square’s new volume added grew 29% year over year, with sales-led NVA surging 62%.
Whether that compounding materializes—and whether sellers ultimately experience Managerbot as a trusted protector or a sophisticated upsell engine—will determine much about Block’s future. The company has staked its corporate identity, its headcount, and its Wall Street narrative on the conviction that AI agents can deliver more value with fewer humans in the loop.
Managerbot is the first product to carry the full weight of that promise. And the small business owners who keep their shops open with Square terminals will be the ones who decide if it delivers.