No Country For Old Systems: Does Ai Have A Place In The Industry?
Almost every sector has been hit by the Ai bubble in some way, shape or form, and plants are no exception. At MJBizCon, Ai was slapped on every booth like a marketing band-aid. Ordering Supplies? Ai. Customer Recommendations? Ai. HR Support? Ai. Automated sniffing dogs? You guessed it—Ai. But does Ai have a place in the industry, or is most of it just a smoke show.
System Overload
Take Blaze, for example. Their AI assistant—Herby, or maybe it was Terpy—was pitched as the answer to customer recommendations. I typed in "sleep," and the results? A few flower SKUs that had nothing obviously sedating about them. When I asked why these showed up, the rep admitted that unless you’ve manually tagged every product correctly in Blaze, it just scrapes the web and guesses based on stock.
That’s not intelligence. That’s Google dressed up in a tech vest. If your team didn’t input the right tags—and let’s be honest, 75% of the time they didn’t—then your AI is guessing. And guesswork doesn’t belong at the counter, especially not in an industry where one wrong recommendation can kill a first-time customer relationship.
“I Am So Smrt”
Ai in anything is only as good as the data it’s fed, and most of that data is either missing, outdated, inconsistent, or just plain wrong.
And its not just a problem for regulated markets, a national hemp distributor in Oregon mentioned they dropped ~$75,000 into Hubspot. Usage? About 3%. Orders still come in like it’s 1998: phone calls, texts, scribbles on paper. Why? Because no one wants to log into some system when they can just shoot a text to their rep and get it handled faster.
Want your CRM to work? You still have to train it. Still have to set up the rules. Still have to babysit the system. Otherwise, when a sales rep dips, or your inventory levels reset, all your systems are now obsolete until updated.
Sales, especially in B2B, is built on speed and relationships—not portals.
A Fool Admire Complexity, A Genius Admire Simplicity
In theory, systems are suppose to make your business more efficient. In practice, they slow your team down because the physical and the digital worlds don’t align,
Sales reps closed the sale, they don’t want to enter data after the fact
Inventory already did the job physically, they don’t want to enter data after the fact
Distribution already delivered the shipment, they don’t want to enter data after the fact
Systems to often require another step that feels like busy work
Most staff aren’t trained to navigate clunky UI or automate workflows
All of this adds up to burnout. And when burnout sets in, accuracy tanks. Now your system’s running on garbage data and your AI assistant is recommending CBD dog treats for insomnia.
The Human Experience
If your having a hard time keeping track of inventory or sales, don’t get distracted by buzzwords and dashboards. You’re not running a science experiment. You’re running a business that sells fire, not features. Choose systems that serve your team, not the other way around.
