spent most of this session working on one of the bigger systems behind socle: the analytics/intelligence engine.

the goal is basically to make sure socle does more than just collect feedback and throw a bunch of charts at a business. if someone scans a Snap, leaves feedback, recognizes an employee, saves a place, visits somewhere, or interacts with socle in another way, that creates a signal. the harder part is figuring out what those signals actually mean when you start connecting them together.

so i started building out the system that takes those interactions and turns them into actual insights and suggestions.

for example, instead of just saying “service mentions went down,” socle should be able to notice the pattern, look at what guests are actually saying, which types of guests are experiencing it, whether it is happening repeatedly or is just an outlier, and then suggest what the business could actually do about it.

i also spent a lot of time on the explanation side of it. i really don’t want the dashboard to randomly spit out recommendations with no idea where they came from. every insight needs to have evidence behind it, so businesses can see why socle thinks something is happening, what signals contributed to it, and how confident the system is.

if it gets something wrong, they should also be able to report that so we can keep improving the logic.the engine connects things like written feedback, selected responses, recognitions, interaction history, guest taste/context, repeated patterns, and changes over time. when multiple signals point toward the same thing, the system can treat that differently from one random interaction instead of pretending every piece of data means the same amount.

i also worked on how this splits between the business and employee dashboards. managers need broader operational suggestions and patterns across the business, while an employee should get useful feedback about what they are doing well and what they could improve without just getting a weird analytics graph thrown at them.a big rule while building this has been no fake intelligence.

if there is not enough evidence to make a useful conclusion yet, socle should say that instead of inventing one. right now a lot of the engine is deterministic/rules-based so i can actually test why every result appears. later i want to add an AI layer on top so businesses can ask questions directly and the system can reason across all of this context, but i want the underlying data and evidence system to be solid first.this is probably one of the first updates where the two sides of socle really start connecting together.

the guest-facing product creates the interactions, Snap gives us another real-world interaction point, and the intelligence engine turns all of that into something a business can actually use.still a lot to build and test, but this is starting to feel a lot less like “analytics” and a lot more like the intelligence layer i originally wanted socle to become.