The World Today: A Patchwork of Closed Systems
If you run a restaurant or small business today, your operations depend on a dozen disconnected systems that rarely communicate.
Your POS handles in-store sales and staff. Your delivery apps like DoorDash or Uber Eats run their own menus and orders. Your reservations live in OpenTable or SevenRooms. Your loyalty, payroll, and accounting systems each sit in separate silos.
Each tool works fine alone — but none of them share data freely. Every platform maintains its own version of your menu, hours, and customer data. You update an item once and repeat it across five dashboards.
You can’t see your business in one place — and you don’t really own the data that defines it.
The Integration Wall: APIs, Politics, and Friction
We’ve integrated with nearly every major POS platform. Here’s the truth:
Square is open and developer-friendly. Clover has APIs
but painfully slow approvals. Toast is nearly closed, requiring formal
partnership vetting. Middleware vendors promise “universal access” but add cost and
fragility.
For developers, this means constant rework. For business owners, it means data and operations trapped behind vendor-controlled walls. What should be a simple connection has become a gatekept process.
The Consequence: Innovation Slows Down
Every new AI or automation product hits the same roadblock — closed data. The first question isn’t “Does it work?” but “Will my POS allow it?” The result: innovation slows, and businesses stay trapped in legacy workflows.
The AI Era Demands a New Foundation
At Foreva AI, we’ve built voice AI agents that take orders, answer calls, and manage daily operations for restaurants. But even a simple voice order requires live data across multiple systems — menus, staff, fulfillment, loyalty — all scattered and siloed.
The real bottleneck isn’t AI capability. It’s data accessibility. AI can’t automate what it can’t see or understand.
Our Belief: The Future Is Owner-Controlled and Agentic
The next generation of business systems must be AI-native, open, and owner-controlled. That means:
- Businesses own their data in one secure, open cloud.
- They control access — granting and revoking permissions without relying on vendors.
- Intelligence is built-in — AI agents act as assistants and managers that work alongside humans.
- Developers can extend the ecosystem through open connectors for new software and hardware.
The Vision: Building the AI-Native Open Cloud
OpenPOS is more than a schema or API. It’s an AI-native data cloud — a new foundation that combines structured data and intelligent agents.
At its core, OpenPOS has three layers:
- Open Data Cloud: A unified, structured store of menus, orders, hours, and staff — fully owned by the business.
- Agentic Core: An intelligence layer where AI agents operate as managers, analyzing and acting on behalf of the owner, and connecting with other intelligent systems.
- Connector Ecosystem: Open adapters for POS systems, printers, KDS devices, and SaaS tools — community-built to make all hardware and software truly interoperable.
It’s not a replacement for existing systems. It’s a foundation that lets all systems work together intelligently.
Beyond Restaurants: Reimagining the SMB Stack
The same fragmentation hurts salons, clinics, and retailers. The old world optimized for control. The new world must optimize for coordination — where businesses own their data, and AI orchestrates it.
The Movement: Building OpenPOS in Public
We’re open-sourcing OpenPOS so developers and partners can build alongside us. Our mission:
Make every small business AI-native — with ownership of its data, intelligence, and workflow automation.
Follow along at foreva.ai/openpos (coming soon) or explore the OpenPOS GitHub Repository.
The Future: From POS to OpenOS
OpenPOS is the foundation of an Open Operating System (OpenOS) for small businesses — where data lives in one open cloud, AI agents collaborate with humans, and every device or app connects through open standards.
The future of business software isn’t another closed SaaS. It’s an open, intelligent ecosystem owned by the people who run it.
Join us. If you’re building AI tools, POS integrations, or SMB automation systems — let’s collaborate to create an open, agentic operating layer for the modern business.
— Jianming Zhou (JZ), Founder & CEO, Foreva AI | foreva.ai
