AI. By now, you’ve heard of it, or you’re using it daily.

Every industry is seeing changes and how far AI is altering the way their businesses work. New businesses form daily, while others struggle more and more as it does. The floral industry is no different. From the farm level to the florist, AI is being utilized in a wide variety of methods and levels in the floral industry.

Almost all sectors and levels of the floral industry are using AI in their marketing and social media campaigns. From full content generation to editing product videos, quickly converting cell phone images to sales-ready documents, content writing and organization, installation mockups and proposals, to chatbots, OH MY! Society of American Florists just launched their ASTER AI chatbot, software companies like Details, Koronet, and Flower Buddy all have AI features built in, and flower shops around the country are writing emails and card messages with the help of AI. Consumers have replaced bridal Pinterest boards with fully generated wedding mockups.

We’ve been having fun with it ourselves, at both ends of the supply chain. On our boutique farm in Cotopaxi, Ecuador, we have added AI into a few workflows. Our Creative Visual Designer, Emilia Coloma, helps keep up with the high demand of “Fresh” content with various AI tools. Graphics and videos for social media and email marketing are the most obvious. But in the backend, AI also helps with file organization, content writing, scheduling, planning, and executing displays and partnerships. On the farm’s technical side, cleaning up and reorganizing data collection and statistics, converting them into readable reports, analyzing data, and more are all done faster with AI.

In our Miami office, AI is used in almost every department. Managers and team members regularly use ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude to help with individual workflows, problem-solving, and organization processes, depending on their needs. The Marketing team and I see AI as a fun tool on our tool belts. A tool that is being re-designed and improved daily. It has gotten to the point where it could be considered a full-time job to keep up with all the ever-growing changes and new developments in AI. Most of our work is still done manually, like flower photography and product videos, but AI helps us make them better, faster. Mobile Apps Capcut and Edits both have AI auto captions, which studies show can increase average watch time by 12–25% and overall engagement by up to 80% when captions are present. Photoshop and Canva both have auto editing and amazing AI tools to speed up editing product and website images. Or even fully design ready-to-post social media content. Podcast editing, trade show graphics, web design, game design, product design, 3D printing, decor, and merch — AI can handle all of it. Our team takes extra care to make sure the AI does not alter the look of the real flowers, and that our image and branding stay true to us.

In our industry, and in our unique situation at Jet Fresh, AI will not be fully taking over any time soon. But it is being widely adopted more and more. However, as an industry that grows and sells NATURE, the amount of water and power required causes an ethical conundrum.  DePaul University’s “The Cost of a Click”  interactive art installation was a great visual demonstration that shows how much water is used on a single AI prompt. Luckily, we know how to do things the “old-fashioned way,” so if we need to stop using AI, we can still accomplish our goals; it might just take longer.

Ryan