Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
As artificial-intelligence services become more commonplace, their impact on the payments industry, both good and bad, is becoming clear.
As a tool to help merchants, AI services can help with a variety of tasks, something restaurant point-of-sale specialist SpotOn Transact LLC will be counting on as it launches its AI-powered service later this week at the National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago.
San Francisco-based SpotOn says this latest service is geared to helping restaurant operators cut costs. The service, whose name has yet to be disclosed, will join SpotOn’s Marketing Assist and Picked for You services, the company says. Marketing Assist, which launched in 2024, automates personalized email and social-media campaigns and can reduce tasks by up to five hours, SpotOn says.
Earlier this year, SpotOn tested Picked for You, which uses AI in online ordering. It can recommend menu items for online customers, which may improve conversion rates and increase orders for a restaurant. AI is used to personalize the customer’s online-ordering experience, SpotOn says, by basing menu recommendations on guest behavior and preferences. It incorporates the time of day, most-viewed items, and most-purchased items for its recommendations.
In related news, cybersecurity platform KnowBe4 Inc. predicts that agentic AI will be part of ransomware, adding new complexity to the malware.
Clearwater, Fla.-based KnowBe4 says agentic AI ransomware is a collection of AI bots that perform all the steps necessary to conduct a successful ransomware attack. It will gain initial access, analyze the environment it infiltrated, determine how to get the maximum hacker profits, and carry out the attacks.
“History shows that the bad actors follow about six to 12 months behind what the good actors invent and discover,” Roger Grimes, KnowBe4 data-driven defense evangelist, says in a statement. “It takes that long for the bad actors to learn what the good actors developed and then figure out not only how to use it maliciously, but place it into existing hacker tools and kits so a broad range of hackers can use them.”
