For better and for worse, how is AI changing how you do business?
Eric Sellew | CEO | ZZZ’s Collective
AI has impacted our artist partners significantly, and has allowed lots of brands to adopt an artsy feel without actually supporting artists or real art. This is a huge negative for our artist partners as it makes it much harder for them to find work with local businesses and communities. Our customers love how we support real artists, so we have no plans to adopt AI art in the future.
Brett Harris | CEO | LuvBuds
For the better, AI can help businesses process data faster, improve communication and operate more efficiently. For the worse, it can make the world feel even more impersonal and flood it with a lot of polished nonsense. We use AI as a tool, not a substitute. Our goal is to use it to make our business more personal, not less.
Shavon Sullivan Wright | CEO | The Grass Cab
I think of AI as an opportunity. Cannabis marketing is restricted in so many ways, and I plan to use AI to change the game for my dispensary. I want to fully integrate it into my menu and ordering systems, personalize emails and alerts, and build stronger connections with customers. It’ll help me reach the right people, build loyalty, and keep track of my Grass Cab Ride Society, the customers who keep rolling with us.
Colin Fraser | CEO | Upling
AI is changing everything — and if you’re not using it, you’re already behind.
On the better side, AI lets us:
– Personalize recommendations through BUD-E, so customers aren’t guessing what to buy
– Optimize delivery routes, timing and operations
– Understand customer behavior at a deeper level and increase order value
We’re moving cannabis from “trial and error” to precision and personalization, and that’s a game changer. But on the challenging side, AI raises the bar.
– Customers expect faster, smarter experiences
– Data privacy becomes more critical — especially with genetics
– Competition gets stronger because tools are more accessible
So AI is a weapon, but only if you use it responsibly and strategically.
Chris Mapson | Executive Vice President of Marketing | Cannatrol
AI is beginning to play a larger role across almost every industry, including cannabis, particularly as the industry moves toward greater GMP-style compliance, process control and operational consistency. Like many companies, we use AI as a tool to help streamline certain workflows and analyze information more efficiently. There is definitely value in its ability to make some aspects of business faster and easier. As the industry becomes increasingly data-driven, tools that can help operators better understand processes and consistency will continue to grow in importance.
At the same time, AI is only as good as the information and interpretation behind it. “Bad data in equals bad data out” is a very real concern, especially in highly technical industries like cannabis cultivation and post-harvest processing. The quality of the output depends heavily on the quality of the inputs, the context and even the prompts being used. There is still a critical need for human expertise, scientific understanding and real-world operational knowledge to interpret results properly. AI can be a valuable support tool, but it cannot replace experience, critical thinking or measurable process control.
Inesa Ponomariovaite | CEO | Nesa’s Hemp
AI is compressing time across the board. Things that used to take weeks — research, content development and even early-stage formulation insights — can now happen in days.
But there’s a real downside, especially in this category. AI is also accelerating misinformation. We’re seeing more low-quality brands using AI-generated content to make claims that aren’t substantiated by real testing or clinical insight.
In a space like hemp, where trust is already fragile, that’s a problem. So while we use AI as a tool, we’re doubling down on human expertise: working with clinicians, investing in real data and making sure what we say is actually backed up.
Max Vansluys | President | Dialed In Gummies
AI has been really valuable for us when it comes to digesting large amounts of data and giving us more real-time visibility into the business. We’re using it to help build dashboards and analyze things like consumer trends, sales patterns and which products are performing best in different markets. With API integrations and live feedback loops, we can make decisions much faster instead of waiting for monthly or quarterly reporting cycles. At the same time, I think there’s a misconception that AI can replace critical thinking. Everything still needs to be double-checked. What goes into the system ultimately dictates what comes out, so you need strong inputs and human oversight to make sure the information is actually useful and accurate. It’s a powerful tool, but it’s not a substitute for everything.
Ryan Hunter | Chief Revenue Officer | Spherex
To date, AI has not been overly transformational for our business. AI is showing up in lots of little ways to increase individual worker productivity through notetaking, composition and creative asset development. We have yet to identify an opportunity to implement AI in a way that would radically transform how we operate. However, we are always asking ourselves, “how can we do this better?” So there could easily come a time when AI becomes the answer to that question — just not yet.
Brian Staffa | Managing partner | High Revival Holdings
It’s saving time and enabling my managers and C-suite to execute more efficiently and productively. We are no longer limited by Flowhub’s reporting tools; I finally feel free to export my data and use it in a way that makes sense for us. We can have a stream of consciousness brainstorm and AI will organize everything succinctly so we can act on it later.
Alex Gonzalez | President | Calyx Containers
AI is helping us remove friction from the unglamorous but critical parts of the business: order entry, quoting, artwork flow, procurement, inventory visibility and customer follow-up. The goal is never to replace the relationship side of cannabis packaging. It is to make every operational handoff faster, cleaner and more transparent so customers get a much stronger procurement experience from first quote through reorder.
Jeremy Zachary | CEO | Zen Brands Intl.
AI has helped our business model streamline in areas where we were inefficient. AI has been an asset to our business, aiding administration with daily tasks to complex process flow modeling. Ultimately, quality still requires human ingenuity. That won’t be replaced anytime soon.
Alleh Lindquist | CEO | FloraWorks
We’re actively adopting agentic AI across the company, using it to automate workflows, synthesize research and support decision-making. It’s a force multiplier for speed and output. The risk is over-reliance; AI can create false confidence if you don’t understand the domain. The advantage comes from pairing it with real expertise and knowing where it breaks.
Kevin Hart | CEO | Green Check
As a tech-based company, one that foundationally has always focused on data, we love the potential AI enables. However, with our beginning-with-the-end-in-mind ethos, we are careful as to how we experiment with the tools and especially the outcomes. As a compliance company, accuracy matters over speed — always!
Chris Fontes | CEO | High Spirits
AI has increased our accuracy in accounting, supply chain management and forecasting. If you are not focusing on AI aggressively at this point, you might be out of business in 12 months. Like it or hate it, it’s happening, and it is happening much quicker than most people realize.
Ali Garawa | CEO | Muha Meds
AI has significantly increased our output and expanded what we’re able to execute across the board. We’ve built a best-in-the-business team across marketing, operations and analytics, and AI enhances that foundation by helping us move faster, streamline workflows and bring ideas to life more efficiently. The real value comes from using it to amplify what a strong team can already do and push execution further, not replace it.
Ashley Feagins | Account Manager |Proven Media
AI has become a core tool, especially for streamlining workflows and accelerating research. It allows me to move faster and focus more on strategy and relationships. At the same time, it’s still a tool, not a replacement. It requires strong oversight, fact-checking and human judgment to ensure the work is accurate, intentional and aligned.
Sasha Nutgent | VP of Cannabis Retail |Housing Works Cannabis Co
AI is still a fairly new tool that has its positives and negatives. On the positive side, our ECOMM offers AI generated suggestions based on their previous purchases, allowing for a more personalized experience and one that can be helpful to those who maybe want to try something new, but still within the realm of what they usually go for. It will also be interesting to see how AI impacts SEO for retailers. There’s also been some discussion within the industry about how AI can be used to change the customer’s in-store experience, which could potentially replace budtenders with AI bots.
Sandra Bergman | Founder & CEO |ESBE Marketing
In helping dispensaries across the U.S. to improve customer retention, we’ve used Claude to crunch large datasets and analyze months of data to create client-specific benchmarks. We’ve trained it on our processes and philosophies, so it can generate meaningful insights and “warn” us when things start to trend downward. We can now answer more complex client questions in 30 minutes instead of hours because we no longer have to manipulate raw data and crunch all the numbers.
Ashley Infausto | CEO | Scoutwell
AI is accelerating how we build and enabling true personalization — from sleep data to individualized cannabinoid protocols — but it’s also flooding the market with generic “AI-powered” wellness. At Scoutwell, we use it to drive real outcomes, not just speed. The opportunity is precision at scale; the risk is noise. The brands that win will use AI to deepen trust, not dilute it.
Michael Mejer | Founder | Green Lane Communication
AI has dramatically increased speed and lowered the barrier to producing content, but it’s also flooded the market with polished mediocrity. In public relations and media relations, that matters. Reporters are seeing more pitches than ever that sound technically correct but completely forgettable. At Green Lane Communication we use AI to accelerate research, narrative development and drafting, but the real-world advantage still comes from strategic thinking, editorial instinct, relationships and knowing what’s actually worth saying in the first place.
Cameron Clarke | CEO | Sunderstorm
With over 1.5 billion records in our dataset, AI lets us mine our ERP, layer in market intelligence and cross-reference sales and marketing data to surface insights fast. We use it for competitive analysis, complex financial modeling, regulatory research, efficient production scaling, packaging compliance, affiliate marketing strategy and brand intelligence. It’s a force multiplier by compressing days of analytical work into hours and providing insights previously unimaginable.