MJBiz - May/June 2024 - 45

" It's like a sales assistant for budtenders, "
Kooi said. " It's intended to bring some data
to the conversation about what products
somebody's choosing. "
As of late April, about 25 retailers were using
the upselling application, which costs $499 per
month, per location.
" The approach we're taking is that the AI is
there to assist the budtender, make their job
easier and make them more effective-not to
drive the conversation. "
NEXT-GENERATION SERVICES
CannManage is among a new crop of startups
offering cannabis companies AI services such
as customized OpenAI GPT and targeted AI
integration.
Founder Beth Myers and Chief Technical
Writer Thomas Buckley have been utilizing
generative AI to help automate and expedite
the licensing process for clients, a cumbersome
and expensive task in nearly every medical and
adult-use marijuana market that often includes
consultants, legal teams and other local
business experts.
Since its August launch, Denver-based
CannManage primarily has focused on
automating certain aspects of technical writing
for marijuana business licensing applications,
incorporating plug-ins and other components
to enhance capabilities.
But CannManage's expansion plan is far more
encompassing.
" We're going to centralize them into one
application software, " Myers said. " I anticipate
we'll have a really good product to market here
in the next two quarters. "
Myers, who has spent more than 16 years
producing cannabis content, helping marijuana
businesses secure licenses and managing retail
operations, is excited about the next phase of AI
integration in the industry.
" Every single one of us has a gem, and we're
running with it. "
AI Empowering
Executives
C-suite executives might be considered a company's
most powerful group. In reality, they are at the mercy of
accountants, advisers, data analysts and other staff who
provide them with the information they need to make
decisions.
Artificial intelligence can change that by giving executives
the data they need when they need it.
" Data doesn't necessarily need to be handled by IT
anymore, " explained John Hanna, vice president of
technology at C3 Industries, a vertically integrated
cannabis company in Michigan. " Executives can now type
regular questions into a dialog box, and it'll use key terms
to really understand what the question is and retrieve and
build the query for your data.
" I think we're at a point where any executive-or any
person, frankly, in the company-can use AI to ask
questions and retrieve information without necessarily
having a technical background. "
Like their peers in other industries, more cannabis
executives are learning to leverage AI to help lead their
companies.
Tom Regan, CEO of Root & Bloom, a cannabis extraction
and product manufacturing company in Salisbury,
Massachusetts, said he sees three main areas where AI can
be used to gather and analyze " market intelligence: "
* Product and segment sales.
* Consumer behavior.
* Product design and innovation.
Regan said Root & Bloom only recently started using
" external " AI tools " to pick through " market data and " to
reach conclusions on the way we price products. "
He said questions Root & Bloom executives ask AI include:
* What's the next product in our pipeline that we should
design?
* Who is the prototypical consumer?
* Are we designing the right products at the right price
for the greatest swath of customers?
ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
C3 is building an AI-enabled data warehouse, Hanna said.
The data warehouse will have multiple information sources,
such as point of sale, cultivation and manufacturing; AI
will analyze those data sets and " anticipate " questions, he
added.
Chris Casacchia covers retail for
MJBizDaily and MJBizMagazine.
He can be reached at chris.
casacchia@mjbizdaily.com.
" If you want it to know sales of all locations within your
enterprise, then, if you ask that question, it will understand
or reason that you will probably ask for the same data by
market, by category of product, by various different ways
you can dice up the data. "
- Omar Sacirbey
mjbizdaily.com | May-June 2024 45
http://www.mjbizdaily.com
MJBiz - May/June 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of MJBiz - May/June 2024
