Marijuana executives use AI to make product decisions
Summary
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. “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. 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:” 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? When determining which AI tools to buy for your businesses, John Hanna, vice president of technology at Michigan-based C3 Industries, a vertically integrated cannabis company, recommends that executives start by assessing their existing tech stack and “taking inventory of all the software that you are currently using.” “Have internal resources take a deep dive into each one of those software pieces that you own, and research the existing capabilities. Hanna estimated that a fee of $20 per user per month for a basic AI tool “is reasonable.” Root & Bloom, a cultivation and extraction and cannabis products business based in Salisbury, Massachusetts, spends a “couple thousand” dollars per month across the company for its AI tools, Regan said.