You’ve heard the buzz since March of 2023 and the release ofChatGPT-4. You’ve seen the parlor tricks where someone rewrote your tasting notes like they came from a pirate or made your bottle shots look like a Van Gogh paintings. That can be fun, but will it materially move your business or change how your team works?

Now don’t get me wrong, GenAI can immediately and measurably improve your winery. These benefits can span almost every area of your business from strategy, forecasting, production, across marketing, through your tasting room, and continuously through ongoing customer satisfaction. So, let’s look at the hype driving interest in GenAI and how that can apply to your winery.

Productivity

Organizations that do adopt GenAi solutions like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, or Microsoft’s Copilot consistently see improvements in staff efficiency across practically every employee. The chart below comes from Boston Consulting Group’s work with a client that found 80% of the roles in their workforce would see efficiency gains from the introduction of GenAI[1].Put another way, you can quickly and broadly grow your staff’s productivity by investing as little as $30/month per employee. You don’t need GenAI to see the ROI for that investment.

Quality

Not only will your team get more done, but the work will also be of a higher quality. On an episode of HBR Ideacast, Wharton professor Ethan Mollick cited a study by his team that found a 40% improvement in the quality of answers when people used GenAI in their work[2].For all the operations and project management freaks reading this, we have essentially broken the iron triangle. It used to be a rule of thumb that you could pick two out of three on a project: cheap, fast, or good. Well, with GenAI, you’ll get it faster, it will be better, and it really does not cost much. And remember, this benefit gets spread across your staff.

For SECURITY

Those stats are great and all, but honestly $360/yr per employee adds up. As a result, many winery’s are taking a wait and see on GenAI for a variety of reasons. They have other priorities for their budget. They haven’t needed it before, so how urgent can it be? Besides, can’t my employees get it for free? Now thatNowthat is the problem… they can get it for free, they do use it for free, and they are sharing your data with the public model. Exactly how many or what percentage of employees use GenAI at work without formal approval is hard to estimate because they keep it a secret. However, Salesforce released finding from a survey of 14,000 employees that found 28% of them were using GenAI, and half (14%) were doing so with unapproved tools and 40% of them (11.8%) were using banned tools[3]. That means your team is already using it, they just have not told you.

For TRAINING

Regardless of the reasons, having employees go off and use a tool on their own hurts your business. The risk of sharing your data is top of the list, but your winery loses other benefits. If you openly deploy the tool to your staff, you can train them on proper and effective use of the tool. Remember, GenAI can make things up, return misinformation, or give bad answers. These risks can be mitigated with training in how to use it and vet the answers. Otherwise, your staff may “fall asleep at the wheel” and stumble into an embarrassing mistake. On a more positive note, if you staff openly uses GenAI, they can learn from one another. This is a new technology without an established playbook. You want your tasting room staff to compare how they get the best preparation for an upcoming reservation. You want your club manager and tasting room manager to talk about how they spot upsell opportunities in your customer data. That cycle of shared best practices lifts everyone up and increases the benefits to your winery.

Now is the Time to Start

So don’t wait to introduce GenAI to your team. It will more than pay for itself from the productivity and quality gains. More importantly, the sooner you adopt it as a key tool for your employees the sooner you close the security risk and learn how to best use it to improve across your entire operation. If you wait, it is like spilling your harvest out in the field as you leak out proprietary information and miss the gains you could realize today.

[1] “The Path to Generative AI Value Begins with a Workforce Diagnostic,” Boston Consulting Group, October 2023

[2] “Tech at Work: What GenAI Means for Companies Right Now.” HBR IdeaCast, May 2,2024

[3] “More than Half of Generative AI Adopters Use Unapproved Tools at Work,” Salesforce, November 2023

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