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I’ve been in the green industry for 42 years now, which is hard to believe but true. When I started, we used U.S. mail, corded telephones and met most of our clients face-to-face. If we needed to tell someone something, we had to pick up the phone and hope that they were at home or in their office to answer. We used radios in our trucks to communicate with our crews when they were in the field.
If we hadn’t embraced smartphones, email or software as it was introduced, I’m not even sure we could operate in today’s world. I’ve seen the discourse currently happening around artificial intelligence happen for every new technology: Some people swear it’ll be revolutionary, while others swear it’ll end civilization as we know it. The truth has historically always been somewhere in the middle.
There’s no question that AI can help landscaping company owners and leaders get more done in less time, but I think the caveat is that we must outsource the right things to AI.
It’s important that we’re still practicing skills we need and teaching them to our teams, such as:
Critical thinking and problem solving. AI hallucinates, and even if it can be useful in generating ideas, we need to still have the critical thinking skills to decide if what it’s recommending is a good idea. It’s important that we’re still practicing good leadership and teaching less-experienced team members to think for themselves.
Developing others. There is an art to teaching skills to other people, and technology is a very long way off from replacing the hands-on work that our teams do. While AI may be able to help you design or document your training program, you still need to be teaching the skills (my favorite way is with a see-one, do-one, teach-one format).
Having real-world conversations. AI can’t help you make genuine in-person connections. You need to get to know your clients and team members. An oldie but a goodie book on this is “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie, if you want to improve this skill.
On the flip side, every minute we save on an administrative task is time we could instead spend nurturing relationships with our two most important groups — our clients and our teams. So, here is how my team at Grunder Landscaping Co. uses AI to improve efficiency:
Bidding and estimating. We’re using Bobyard to streamline our bidding process on large commercial bids, and it’s helping the salespeople focused on this work to get more bids out in less time.
Writing some communications. We’re using AI to improve the professionalism of our communications. We use it to better organize and quickly draft things like our snow-and-ice-event emails to clients, responses to complaints or concerns, internal emails and meeting agendas. Importantly, we read everything and make changes before anything is sent.
My H.O.T. — honest, open, transparent — take is I worry that we lose authenticity if we use AI too heavily here. I don’t want AI writing every email, cards to friends and family or even my LinkedIn posts. Instead, I want to encourage you to be yourself in those places, and use AI to research, learn, cure writer’s block or improve your writing — not do it entirely for you.
Capturing meeting notes. We use Fireflies.ai to take notes for our meetings. The notetaker automatically joins any Teams meetings we set up, and we can also open it on our phones for in-person meetings. It captures action items, provides a transcript for team members who weren’t there and is a searchable record if we need to refer to it.
We’re exploring more ways to use it, but at the end of the day, people still do business with people. Not with computers, AI, avatars or robots. Use AI to create more time in your day to spend on the things that matter.
This is especially important as the busy season gets into full swing, and if you’re looking for more ways to improve your efficiency and reduce headaches, I encourage you to listen to some episodes of my podcast, “The Grow Show.” We cover a wide range of topics to help landscape pros, all in an audio format you can listen to while driving between job sites. Find episodes online at here.
