Per Diem Expands Olivia AI With Agentic Capabilities
The enhanced AI assistant moves beyond business insights to help restaurants execute marketing, loyalty, and operational tasks through natural conversation.
Running a restaurant involves hundreds of small decisions, from figuring out why Tuesdays are slow to deciding when to launch a promotion or adjust preparation times. The information needed to make those decisions is often already available, but turning it into action can mean navigating multiple dashboards, reviewing reports, and making changes manually.
Per Diem is expanding Olivia, its AI assistant built into the merchant dashboard, with new agentic capabilities designed to make that process simpler. Olivia is evolving from an assistant that answers questions about a restaurant's performance into one that can also help carry out the work.
With approximately 50 actions supported or planned across marketing, loyalty, menus, and store operations, the enhanced Olivia experience allows merchants to describe what they want to accomplish in plain English. Olivia can retrieve relevant business information, prepare changes, and present them for approval before anything goes live.
From asking questions to getting things done
Olivia already helps restaurant operators understand their business through conversational questions about sales, ordering trends, popular products, and store performance.
The enhanced experience brings those insights closer to execution.
A coffee shop owner could ask, "When is my slowest day of the week?" Olivia can examine the store's ordering activity and identify when sales tend to dip. Rather than leaving the merchant to figure out the next step, Olivia can help turn that insight into a campaign, complete with a promotional offer and push notification.
A restaurant looking to increase weekday traffic could ask Olivia to prepare a limited-time coupon, while a growing brand could use it to adjust store settings across multiple locations.
The goal is to connect the decision with the work that follows, allowing merchants to move from identifying an opportunity to acting on it within the same conversation.
AI capabilities across the restaurant business
Olivia's expanded capabilities reach across several areas of the Per Diem platform, bringing everyday management tasks into a single conversational experience.
For marketing, merchants can ask Olivia to create coupons, prepare promotional campaigns, configure banners, and manage push notifications, including recurring weekly messages. Olivia can also use business insights to help identify opportunities for targeted promotions.
For loyalty, new capabilities include managing points promotions, adding rewards, enabling visit streaks, and configuring interactive checkout games. These give restaurants more ways to encourage repeat visits without manually setting up each experience.
Olivia also supports menu and operational management. Merchants can show or hide products, update menu categories, adjust business hours, and configure preparation times.
For operators managing several stores, supported settings can be updated across locations through a single request. A franchise operator, for example, could ask Olivia to set preparation times to 20 minutes across all locations instead of making the change individually at every store.
Merchants remain in control throughout the process. Olivia presents proposed changes for review and requires approval before executing them, while respecting existing account permissions.
A more intuitive AI experience
Alongside its expanded actions, Olivia introduces improvements designed to make the assistant easier to discover and use throughout the merchant dashboard.
Saved conversations allow merchants to revisit previous discussions and continue where they left off. A dedicated "What Olivia can do" panel organizes available capabilities across marketing, loyalty, catalog, and operations, helping operators understand the tasks Olivia can assist with.
Suggested questions on the dashboard offer a starting point for common business needs, such as "Drive lunch orders," "Slow right now, fix it," and "When is my slowest day of the week?"
The assistant is also accessible through an "Ask Olivia" button across the dashboard, reducing the need to navigate away from the task at hand.
For more involved requests, Olivia can display the steps it is taking, such as reviewing sales trends or preparing a campaign, so merchants can follow its progress before approving an action.
Behind the experience, Olivia draws on the appropriate business data and connected platform capabilities to answer questions and prepare relevant actions.
Toward a restaurant dashboard that works for its operators
The expansion of Olivia reflects Per Diem's broader direction for restaurant management software, where AI helps reduce the manual effort involved in running a business.
As restaurants expand, managing marketing campaigns, loyalty programs, menus, and operational settings becomes increasingly complex. Even routine changes can involve several steps, particularly for brands operating across multiple locations.
By connecting these workflows through conversational AI, Per Diem is working toward a different approach to restaurant management, one where operators can spend less time navigating software and more time focusing on customers and growth.
The longer term vision is a dashboard that merchants rarely need to navigate manually. Instead, they can tell Olivia what they want to accomplish, review the proposed actions, and let the platform handle the execution.
Restaurants can learn more about Olivia on the Per Diem AI Copilot page.
About Per Diem
Per Diem builds branded mobile ordering, web ordering, loyalty, and marketing products for restaurants, coffee shops, bakeries, and growing food brands using Square point of sale.
The platform helps merchants manage ordering, delivery, rewards, subscriptions, catering, and direct customer communication while maintaining control of their brand and customer relationships.
