ShortCuts (Jonas ANZ): Ask Shortie AI Powered Salon Insights

What Shortcuts Wanted
Shortcuts, a leader in software for the hair and beauty industry, wanted to give salon owners and stylists a faster, smarter way to understand their business performance. Their vision was an AI-powered assistant that could instantly answer plain language questions about key metrics — from bookings and sales to staffing — helping users make better decisions on the spot.

What We’ve Delivered
Through our Lean Launch framework, we’re delivering Ask SHORTIE, a working MVP that:

• Lets salon owners ask natural language questions tied to a core set of performance reports.
• Uses an NLP layer to map queries to the right data and return answers instantly in a chat interface.
• Includes logging for future tuning and safeguards for out-of-scope questions.
• Demonstrates extended capabilities such as dynamic queries and actionable recommendations for specific use cases.

What’s Next
Post-launch, Ask SHORTIE will evolve into a fully integrated AI product for the salon journey — with AI-generated recommendations, support for multi-location reporting, and deeper workflow integration into appointments, dashboards, and marketing. Continuous monitoring, optimisation, and retraining will ensure the assistant stays accurate, relevant, and commercially valuable as usage grows.