Square Product Head Willem Avé: There Is Still a Lot of Software Waiting to Be Written
Willem Avé, the global product head of Square, stated that there is still a lot of software waiting to be written and expressed excitement about this space. His statement did not include specific products or timelines, with the core judgment being that software supply is far from saturated.
Avé is currently the global product head at Square, responsible for the strategy and implementation of the company’s software system. He joined Square in 2014 after the acquisition of the appointment scheduling startup BookFresh, where he served as CTO; he has held various positions within Square, including engineering, general manager of business units, and head of POS and platform products, and will oversee Square products starting in 2025.
Square is part of Block and serves over 4 million merchants, with public materials stating that it processed over $250 billion in payments last year. In recent years, Block has eliminated the general manager system and shifted to a functional structure focused on product, design, and engineering, while promoting internal automation. Avé has repeatedly emphasized that organizations should operate around merchant outcomes; the further away from the customer, the worse the delivery quality.
His recent public roadmap includes a management AI agent for small merchants called Managerbot, as well as using AI for inventory, marketing, and internal processes, rather than just for conversational demonstrations. In 2025, Square will also make its product roadmap public, reasoning that transparency can build merchant trust. Block stated that in the first half of 2026, Square will deliver about 130 features, approximately three times that of the same period last year, and that the average code changes per engineer have increased by about 150%.
The Square product line has expanded from early card readers to include cash registers, banking, credit, Bitcoin payments, and merchant networks. Avé's judgment aligns with the company's narrative: there is still a lack of software that small merchants can directly use, and AI is being used to fill the gap that only large enterprises could afford in operational systems.
In terms of market mechanisms, this is not a transaction event driven by buying and selling, but rather a statement from the product head about the remaining demand for software. Funds continue to flow from merchant payment processing fees, SaaS subscriptions, and financial services into Block's software and AI toolchain. The beneficiaries are the Square software layer that continues to expand its features; the pressured parties are competitors whose functionality is stagnant and rely solely on hardware or rates for payment collection. The event is weakly driven, more of a resonance between capacity and narrative.
Source: Public Information
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Avé's entry into Square is a typical case of retention through acquisition: BookFresh, which handled appointment scheduling for small merchants, was integrated in 2014, and he transitioned from engineering to the POS platform and then to the head of product. Square itself has evolved from a headphone jack card reader into a merchant operating system, relying on continuously adding software modules rather than stopping at payment channels. Under Jack Dorsey's leadership, Block has transformed the company into a functional structure while streamlining its workforce, simultaneously rolling out internal AI tools like Goose, Builderbot, and Buzz into development, with the logic of producing more features with fewer people. Avé stated, "There is still a lot of software that hasn't been written," corresponding to the company's view that delivery speed has become a business variable.
The direction of capital movement is clear: payment gross margins sustain software, and software in turn enhances merchant retention and penetration of additional financial products. Managerbot will first cover millions of merchants before expanding to all, effectively making the "virtual store manager" a standard component. The motivation is that small merchants cannot afford traditional ERP and consulting teams; whoever first turns inventory management, scheduling, and marketing into a no-prompt agent will be able to expand the total addressable market from payment collection to operating systems. Bitcoin payments, public roadmaps, and AI agents are all part of the same resource allocation: using Block's engineering capacity and balance sheet to exchange for merchant daily activity and workflow entry.
Comparative entities include Toast, Shopify, and Clover. Toast deepens the restaurant operating system, Shopify broadens the online store operating system, and Clover relies on its acquiring network to deploy hardware. Square is in the mid-to-late stage of transitioning from payment hardware to a merchant operating system: payments have already scaled, and the next step is to have AI agents perform tasks for store owners. The industry phase is not about reinventing a POS, but about bringing millions of non-technical merchants into the automated operating layer.
Structural changes belong to technological substitution. In the past, small merchant software did not sell well because implementation costs exceeded the time value of store owners; generative agents consolidate setup, memory, and tool invocation into products, replacing the management hours of store owners and external operations. The mechanism is: payment data provides real operational context, AI turns that context into executable actions, and software billing shifts from "feature lists" to "doing the work for you." Whoever controls the transaction flow has a greater qualification to write the software that has yet to be completed.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
Software is not finished because customers still do not know how to use the system.
Payments obtain data, and agents can then do the work for people.
After eliminating layers, capacity must be written into products to count.