Unlocking the Potential of AI in the Lawn, Landscape, and Outdoor Living Industry
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The Content Team,
HALSTEAD.
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While artificial intelligence has been a hot topic since OpenAI’s late 2022 release of their generative AI-powered chatbot called ChatGPT, you’ve likely encountered AI for longer than you realize. Whether it’s self-driving vehicles designed by Tesla, AI-powered autonomous robotic lawnmowers, chatbots that provide customer service, or Netflix’s recommendation algorithm that learns from your viewing history, ratings, and “likes” to help find content on the platform that you’ll enjoy, AI is everywhere, and it’s here to stay.
This cutting-edge technology promises to revolutionize the way businesses operate. Harnessing its power requires understanding its potential; it has the potential to optimize your operations, enhance the customer experience, and drive business growth.
AI helps unlock valuable insights from data to help you make more informed business decisions, automates processes to help you save time, and is a tool to optimize your creative efforts—this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
But what does this mean for the green industry? ChatGPT, and others like it, is free, although they offer a paid option to test new features; the ease of access makes it essential for every business owner to embrace it to stay competitive. Even the average lawn, landscape, and outdoor living business owner can up their game with this technology, making it essential to level up to stay ahead of the competition.
Using AI to your advantage saves time and money but requires a strategic approach as we learn more about its effects. As HALSTEAD co-owner Corey Halstead says, “AI, like ChatGPT, has fundamentally changed the world,” the sooner you train your team members to use it, and to integrate AI into your workflow, leveraging it productively, the better. If you haven’t started leveraging the power of AI in your green industry business yet, now is the time to begin.
What You Need to Know About AI as a Lawn, Landscape, and Outdoor Living Business
The difference between ChatGPT and the AI we saw before its release is the level of sophistication. Whereas chatbots have predetermined responses, ChatGPT generates responses based on the context of the conversation, creating a more personalized experience.
ChatGPT generates 1.8 billion visitors monthly, and its wide availability to the public also sets it apart from previous AI. Because it’s a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology, it allows the average person to have human-like conversations and generates creative content following almost any guidelines the user provides.
With this capability, many business owners are contemplating replacing humans with AI. After all, AI is more efficient, more intelligent, and, in the case of ChatGPT—free, for now. But it’s essential to know its limitations.
Being Aware of AI’s Limitations
AI only knows what it knows—or only the information it has been given. It does not have current access to content on the internet. It cannot generate innovative new ideas, have original thoughts, or replace human creativity. While AI possesses remarkable data analysis, pattern recognition, and prediction capabilities, its limitations highlight the irreplaceable value of human ingenuity, emotion, and experience.
Creativity is a uniquely human attribute that involves thinking imaginatively, generating new ideas, and finding innovative solutions to problems. It results from complex cognitive processes, emotional intelligence, and cultural influences.
Human creativity stems from a deep well of experiences, emotions, and the ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated concepts. This creative thinking is essential in developing novel marketing strategies, unique content, and innovative approaches to engage customers in the lawn, landscape, and outdoor living industry.
There’s a level of industry expertise that AI simply does not have without real-world human experience. You want the content on your business blog to be accurate and reflect your thought leadership in the industry. Completely relying on AI to create content for you will not establish you as a leader in the industry.
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ETHICS OF AI
AI has no moral compass or ethical code but simply presents information logically—albeit well-composed and according to your desired tone. It can also provide inaccurate information, presenting it as factual. While many believe ChatGPT is not plagiarism, it’s still left to the user to verify that the content provided is original. Using tools such as Originality.AI can be effective in ensuring you’re not inadvertently plagiarizing.
Even ChatGPT is upfront about its limited ability, demonstrated by its response (in italics) to the question, “Does ChatGPT plagiarize?”:
As an AI language model, I don't have personal experiences, thoughts, or intentions. I generate responses based on patterns and examples from the data I was trained on. I strive to provide helpful and original information to the best of my abilities. However, please note that I can't guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or originality of the responses, as I don't have real-time access to external sources or the internet. It's always a good idea to fact-check and consult multiple sources for important matters.
Human oversight is essential, not only for ethical oversight but for ensuring the content created is in line with your business’s voice and tone. Using AI without fact-checking and editing its content is a horrible mistake that could have consequences—including legal ramifications. Plus, ChatGPT’s knowledge is limited to information available as of 2021, so it’s not up-to-date.
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GOOGLE SEARCH RANKINGS AND AI-GENERATED CONTENT
HALSTEAD advises landscape industry companies to be cautious with AI content right now, especially because we don’t know what future search penalties could entail. While Google does not penalize AI-generated content currently, it can detect when content is high-quality or low-quality, and it favors high-quality content by giving it a higher search engine ranking.
Successful green industry firms know that quality content helps search engine rankings, and this has been what drives search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Google is clear that quality comes before all else—further proof that human oversight is essential.
The Immense Possibilities of AI
While these cautionary considerations are important, remember that AI is continually learning. The more experience the system has, the smarter it gets. While there may be some speedbumps along the way, you can expect AI to become better with time.
When green industry businesses learn to leverage AI to automate basic tasks and gain cost savings, they can put their focus on the tasks that require original thought and strategy. What is considered a basic task that AI can handle is uncertain and is something that will be determined over time.
Learning to use ChatGPT is essential. Just as you had to learn how to use Google effectively, the same is true with AI. The more detailed prompts you provide ChatGPT, the better responses and insights you’ll get. Effectively utilizing AI tools like ChatGPT requires a slight learning curve to leverage it most effectively. It is through this iterative process of refining prompts and understanding the capabilities of the tool that users can leverage AI most effectively.
When you think of AI as a helpful tool, there are immense possibilities for streamlining your workflow and becoming more efficient. It’s a fantastic tool to use to get started with content creation.
Supplementing Your Lawn, Landscape, and Outdoor Living Marketing and Content Strategy with AI
With 80% of marketers planning to create more content within the next year, being able to create content at scale is essential. Because of the limitations we’ve discussed, AI won’t replace the need for a writer’s or content manager’s intuition, but it’s a game-changer when it comes to creating quality content at scale. By integrating AI into their strategies, businesses can enhance their creativity, efficiency, and effectiveness in reaching their customers.
Using AI content tools to assist you in the creative process helps you become more efficient while creating unique and original content. For example, ChatGPT can generate a response to an email from an angry customer or draft a letter from the owner for your website, which you can review and pick and choose which sections you include and which you eliminate.
ChatGPT is an excellent source when experiencing writer’s block. Writing the first paragraph of any written piece is often the hardest part of crafting it. With ChatGPT, you could enter your proposed topic into ChatGPT and ask it to write an engaging introductory paragraph.
AI may spark ideas about additions you can make to your content to make it valuable. You could also ask it to expand upon an idea that you’ve started writing about or ask it to rephrase something you’ve written when it’s not sitting quite right with you.
Even if you don’t use the content verbatim, its output is often enough to get your creative process moving in the right direction. AI-generated suggestions can help you fine-tune your content to enhance clarity, coherence, and impact. By leveraging AI's language capabilities, you can polish your writing and ensure it effectively conveys your message to your target audience.
The ultimate goal is efficiency and higher productivity, and AI-powered content tools help streamline the content creation process. By utilizing AI in content creation, you can significantly boost productivity. AI tools can automate repetitive tasks, such as proofreading, grammar checks, and formatting. This allows content managers to focus more on strategic aspects of their work, such as ideation, research, and analyzing audience insights. The time saved through AI assistance enables your team to produce a larger content volume without sacrificing quality.
While content creation is one of the ways AI can help you achieve these goals, it can also help you provide exceptional service to create a better customer experience. By creating valuable and engaging content at scale, you can meet the needs and expectations of your target audience more effectively. This personalized approach strengthens customer engagement, increases brand loyalty, and drives conversions.
How to Use AI to Provide Exceptional Service in the Landscape and Outdoor Living Industry
Top landscape industry firms know how important providing exceptional customer service is. It helps you build a positive online reputation, reinforces your brand, and strengthens your company culture, just to name a few benefits.
Chatbots & Personal Assistants
AI-powered chatbots or virtual assistants that help schedule consultations that fit your schedule allow for 24/7 availability, enhance response times, and reduce time spent on such tasks. Plus, its ability to personalize each interaction creates a seamless experience for the customer.
AI can be used to gather customer feedback and to identify trends, patterns, and potential issues for proactive resolution. Your CRM can be set up to automatically ask for feedback after a job is complete, either directing the customer to share their feedback on Google Reviews or Facebook—helping you build your online reputation.
Integrating AI into your business website or social media platforms can be especially helpful. Provide information about your services and answers to frequently asked questions, and this could eliminate calls as prospects can get the answers they need from the chatbot. If you have this feature on your social media platforms, you can have the chatbot provide specific links to the answers on your website, helping lead the prospect further into your sales funnel.
Data-Backed Decisions & Predictions
Imagine predicting customer needs for your services by using AI to analyze customer behavior. For example, this information could help target those needing lawn fertilization services. AI can anticipate customer needs and offer relevant solutions, whether a targeted ad on Facebook or adding a previous customer to an email campaign list.
The ability to analyze data is powerful and helps with segmentation. In fact, AI has transformed how businesses can make data-based decisions. This segmentation allows you to tailor your marketing messages and content to specific customer groups, increasing their relevance and effectiveness. Not only does it help increase conversions by targeting the right people, but it helps provide exceptional service in the meantime.
AI as a Sales & Customer Service Tool
Your sales team can use AI to gather helpful information to help sell a project. For example, they can ask ChatGPT what plantings would thrive in the specific conditions of a prospect’s property and receive a list of possibilities that they can share with the customer to help them envision what their new planting beds might look like.
While a salesperson can ask ChatGPT for common objections for a particular project type and use the information to help prepare for a sales meeting, AI is especially useful post-meeting. It’s an excellent tool for automating tasks such as follow-up emails.
In fact, AI can help draft your email responses and messages for you, too. Suppose you are unsure how to respond to a particularly negative email from a customer. In that case, you can put the email content into ChatGPT and ask it to craft a professional response with good customer service. Not only does this help you quickly craft a response, but you learn how to handle negative emails if you get them in the future, a concept true for all AI-created content.
AI lacks emotions and cannot replicate the depth of human emotional intelligence. It plays a crucial role in forming meaningful connections with customers and prospects, empathizing with their needs, and tailoring marketing messages accordingly.
Human marketers can tap into their emotional intelligence to understand the subtle nuances of human behavior, adapt to different communication styles, and evoke emotional responses that AI cannot replicate.
By combining AI's analytical power with human ingenuity and emotional intelligence, marketers can create powerful strategies that balance data-driven decision-making with creative innovation.