Restaurant owners have spent years watching their margins get eaten alive by delivery app commissions. Now Square is offering a different path — one that runs straight through the AI chatbots millions of people already use every day.
Summary
Key takeaways
- Square launched integrations with ChatGPT and Claude on July 1, letting consumers place restaurant orders directly inside those AI platforms.
- Eligible US Square Online Ordering merchants are automatically opted in at no extra cost and with zero technical setup required.
- Orders route through Square’s “Order by Cash App” infrastructure, with merchants paying only standard processing fees — not the 15% to 30% commissions charged by DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub.
- Agentic commerce — AI completing purchases on behalf of users — is projected to drive nearly $385 billion in US e-commerce spending by 2030.
- Square is also working with Amazon on Alexa voice ordering and co-developing an open Universal Commerce Protocol with Google.
Square turns ChatGPT and Claude into ordering apps — without the commission toll
On July 1, Square announced that its AI-powered restaurant ordering integration with both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude is now live for US merchants. Consumers can ask either AI assistant to find nearby restaurants, browse real menus, and place an order — all without opening a separate app or navigating to a website.
What makes this worth paying attention to isn’t the novelty of AI-assisted ordering. It’s the economics underneath it. Third-party delivery platforms like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub have long charged restaurants commissions ranging from 15% to 30% per order. For independent restaurants operating on net margins of 3% to 9%, a 25% or 30% commission on a $40 digital order can mean preparing food at a loss.
Square’s integration sidesteps that entirely. Merchants pay only Square’s standard online payment processing fee — roughly 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction for most plans — with no variable marketplace commission on top. The company isn’t inserting itself as another aggregator skimming off the top. It’s positioning itself as infrastructure.
How the system actually works
The setup requires nothing from restaurant owners. Any US-based food and beverage merchant with an active Square Online Ordering profile is automatically included. There’s no new API to build, no developer team required, and no enrollment process.
The integration pulls live data directly from each merchant’s Square catalog — menus, pricing, modifiers, and real-time stock availability — so an AI agent is never surfacing items that are sold out. When a customer asks Claude “what’s good for Thai food near me,” the AI can return real, current menus from nearby Square-integrated restaurants.
Orders then flow through Square’s “Order by Cash App” infrastructure, which connects Block’s consumer-facing Cash App to the merchant’s Square Point of Sale and Kitchen Display System. Depending on the AI platform’s configuration, customers either complete checkout entirely inside the chat window or get redirected to the merchant’s ordering page with their cart already populated. Either way, the order appears on the restaurant’s POS system exactly like a direct online order would.
For delivery, Square doesn’t replicate the gig-economy model. Instead of building a driver network funded by percentage-based commissions, it uses a white-label courier dispatch that charges a flat fee — typically around $7 to $10 depending on distance. Restaurants can absorb that fee or pass it to the customer, without it touching their food margins.
Operators can also manually test and audit their AI presence using the “@” symbol to invoke the Order by Cash App plugin directly in ChatGPT, or through the Claude extension directory. Square’s backend reporting tags the source of each order, so restaurants can track exactly how much revenue flows through the AI channel.
Why the fee structure disrupts more than just ordering
The commission gap here is genuinely structural. DoorDash’s top-tier “Premier” plan takes 30% per order plus its own processing fee. Uber Eats charges up to 30% for premium placement, with pickup orders costing up to 10%. Grubhub ranges from 5% to 20% depending on the marketing package. Every one of those platforms also stacks its own payment processing fee on top of the marketplace commission.
Square doesn’t bundle logistics costs into its merchant fee. That’s the key architectural difference. The delivery aggregators built their commission models to subsidize gig-worker fleets, platform marketing, and search placement — and they passed the entire cost to restaurants. Square’s model separates those functions, charging only for what it actually does: process the payment.
During the pandemic, the commission problem became acute enough that cities across the US passed legislation capping delivery app fees. That regulatory pressure reflects how deeply the commission model had damaged restaurant economics. Square’s approach doesn’t require legislation to fix the math — it changes the math by design.
Morgan Kuntze, Global Partnerships Lead at Block, framed the strategic intent directly: “Our investment into agentic commerce aims to offload that responsibility by giving operators time back, helping connect them with customers in their communities, and keeping them at the industry’s cutting edge.”
Partners Coffee as the proving ground
During the pilot phase, Square worked with Partners Coffee, a Brooklyn-based specialty coffee brand, to stress-test the integration in a real-world setting. The brand’s Digital VP, Andrew Costaris, noted that the goal was never to turn the cafe into a hyper-digitized storefront — it was to let the technology work invisibly in the background while the physical experience stayed intact. That framing matters: the strongest use case for AI ordering isn’t replacing the in-store experience, it’s capturing orders that would otherwise never reach the restaurant at all.
Agentic commerce and the $385 billion opportunity
Square’s move into AI-powered restaurant ordering is part of a broader bet on what the industry calls agentic commerce — a model where AI agents don’t just answer questions but actually complete transactions on a user’s behalf. Think of it as the difference between asking a chatbot for restaurant recommendations and having it place the order, confirm the payment, and send you a receipt without you touching a checkout screen.
The market projections behind this shift are significant. Analysts project that agentic shoppers could drive nearly $385 billion in US e-commerce spending by 2030. Already, more than 42% of consumers reportedly use AI tools to assist with shopping tasks like product discovery and comparison. Square is planting its flag in this channel early, before the ordering behavior is fully formed and before competitors have standardized their approaches.
The ChatGPT and Claude integrations are the most visible piece, but they’re not the whole picture. Square is actively working with Amazon to bring merchants into Alexa+ voice commerce experiences. It’s also participating in the AAIF Agentic Commerce Working Group and the W3C Web Payments Working Group — standard-setting bodies that will shape how AI agents and commerce platforms interact at scale. Perhaps most notably, Square is co-developing the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) with Google, an open standard designed to enable seamless discovery and checkout across AI Overviews in Google Search and the Gemini app. As that protocol expands globally, Square intends to keep its merchants at the center of it.
For the more than 4.5 million sellers currently on Square, the practical implication is clear: they get access to an emerging ordering channel without building anything themselves, without hiring developers, and without surrendering a percentage of every order to a platform that treats them as inventory rather than customers.
Block’s broader infrastructure and the Bitcoin thread
Square doesn’t exist independently from its parent company, and that matters for understanding the longer-term architecture here. Block, Inc. — led by CEO Jack Dorsey — holds Bitcoin on its corporate balance sheet and has consistently positioned Bitcoin as central to the future of payments. Cash App, the Block consumer product powering the “Order by Cash App” infrastructure behind these AI integrations, already supports Bitcoin buying, selling, and transfers for millions of users.
No cryptocurrency payment option was announced alongside the ChatGPT and Claude integrations. The current product is straightforwardly about reducing restaurant commission costs through AI-driven direct ordering, not about introducing crypto payments to the food industry. But the infrastructure running underneath these AI orders is the same infrastructure Block has been building toward a broader payments vision — one that includes Bitcoin.
That’s worth noting not as a feature announcement but as structural context. Block is assembling a payments and commerce stack where the same rails handle conventional card payments, AI-driven orders, and Bitcoin transactions. Whether those capabilities converge in the restaurant ordering context remains to be seen, but the plumbing is already shared.
What’s immediately consequential is simpler: Square has given thousands of independent restaurants a way to show up inside the AI platforms where consumers are increasingly starting their search — and it’s doing it at a cost that doesn’t threaten to wipe out their margins before the food even leaves the kitchen. Whether DoorDash and Uber Eats respond by lowering their own fees, or double down on logistics advantages Square can’t replicate, will define the next chapter of this fight.
FAQ
How does Square enable restaurants to receive orders from AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude?
Square integrates with ChatGPT and Claude to allow consumers to browse menus, discover restaurants, and place orders directly inside those AI platforms. The integration pulls live catalog data from each merchant’s Square account, and orders are processed through Square’s “Order by Cash App” infrastructure, routing directly to the restaurant’s Point of Sale and Kitchen Display System.
What fees do restaurants pay when receiving orders through Square’s AI integrations?
Restaurants pay only Square’s standard online payment processing fee — approximately 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction on a standard plan — with no additional marketplace commission. This contrasts sharply with the 15% to 30% per-order commissions charged by third-party delivery platforms like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub.
Are all US Square Online Ordering merchants automatically part of the AI ordering integration?
Yes. Eligible US Square Food and Beverage merchants with an active Square Online Ordering profile are automatically opted in to the AI-powered ordering integration at no extra cost and with no technical setup required.
Does Square’s AI ordering support Bitcoin or cryptocurrency payments?
No crypto payment option has been announced for the AI ordering integrations. Orders currently process through conventional payment rails. However, the underlying “Order by Cash App” infrastructure is the same system that Cash App uses to support Bitcoin transactions — meaning the technical foundation exists, though Block has made no specific announcement about cryptocurrency payments for restaurant ordering.
Article produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed by the editorial team.
