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Lightspeed Commerce Inc. has launched Lightspeed AI, becoming the latest point-of-sale system and e-commerce platform provider to add an artificial intelligence layer to its platform.
Lightspeed is integrating the app into its retail, restaurant, and NuOrder business-to-business platforms in an effort to provide merchants and business-to-business sellers with automated insights into their operations, automate tasks such as creating product descriptions and Web sites, and better manage inventory and staffing.
The launch of Lightspeed AI comes hard on the heels of Toast Inc. enhancing its IQ AI assistant with artificial intelligence earlier this week.
A natural language-based AI app, Lightspeed AI enables merchants to ask such questions as “What were my best-selling items last weekend?” and receive contextual insights in real time, as opposed to just raw data, without searching through multiple reports, Lightspeed says. Merchants can refine the interaction by asking follow up questions without starting the process over. To ask a question, merchants type it into the app.
Natural language-based AI apps use natural-language processing to understand, interpret, and generate human text or speech for such tools as chatbots, voice assistants, and automated customer service.
In addition to its natural-language capabilities, Lightspeed AI has a product-photo enhancement feature that allows merchants to manipulate product photos through cropping, lighting adjustments, background removal, or replacement without the need for third-party editors.
“We kept hearing the same thing from merchants: they’re sitting on a huge amount of data, but it’s hard to actually use it day-to-day. Getting answers often means digging through dashboards, pulling reports, or relying on gut instinct. Lightspeed AI was built to change that,” Dax Dasilva, founder and chief executive for Lightspeed, says by email. “Lightspeed AI helps merchants quickly understand what’s happening in their business without needing to be a data expert.”
The integration of Lightspeed AI into Lightspeed’s restaurant platform will help address a longstanding challenge in the hospitality industry, that of analyzing data across siloed applications and systems. As a result, restaurants can more easily understand performance trends, identify bottlenecks, and adjust service flows as needed.
“When merchants have clearer insights, they can respond more quickly to what customers actually want,” Dasilva says. “Just as important, by removing the friction of manual analysis, Lightspeed AI frees up time for merchants and their teams to focus on what matters most.”
