With the new public interest in conversational AI, Hytiva Technologies is uniquely poised to share more about the advancement it has already made in AI, and build on that momentum in a way that all participants in the cannabis industry will appreciate more than ever before.
Hytiva® has been open about its use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) from its beginning, adding powerful capabilities to its technology to maximize efficiency and support client operations. With recent event in the AI space, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and other Large Language Model (LLM) innovations, the conversation around AI has grown to include a much broader audience than ever before, bringing excitement, intrigue, and debate around the use of AI in every industry. The Hytiva Technologies team has continued its work to advance its use of AI in cannabis, and is delighted that topics like algorithms, machine learning, and AI in general are drawing interest from the average person, allowing them to share more about their innovations and how Hytiva continues to build the future cannabis industry.
Tom Clarke, CEO of Hytiva, shared:
AI is only in its infancy, but already has fantastic potential and challenges our assumptions across every area of our lives. It is up to us, now, to set the standards for the appropriate use of AI and make sure that it represents the best of humanity by serving the needs of everyone, safely and respectfully. We must collaborate to put a real, international framework for AI in place.
Read the full press release at the Hytiva Newsroom
How Hytiva is Using AI Today
While the new advancements in conversational and generative AI have given users an exciting new ability to directly interact with AI systems, Hytiva clients and consumers have already benefited from and interacted with many forms of AI, including:
- Natural Language Processing that brings people together – When customers order from Hytiva client dispensaries or communicate with Hytiva POS clients, they can respond to automated text messages from the dispensary. Hytiva systems process these messages and notify the dispensary of actionable messages such as the customer letting the dispensary know they have arrived for their pickup order and what curbside spot they are in for curbside pickup orders.
- Computer Vision that removes repetitive tasks – The highly regulated environment in cannabis and technology limitations of most governmental organizations requires every product Hytiva offers to include scanning of documents and barcodes for identification, regulatory requirements, lab results, and more. Hytiva uses specially designed computer vision technology, backed by machine learning, to quickly identify, scan, and capture the information on these documents, saving time for everyone along the way. For facilities without Hytiva technology, these documents are a huge investment of time spent scanning, retyping information, matching them to records in their system, and more.
- Machine Learning that increases customer and staff happiness – Hytiva delivery clients and consumers benefit every day from Hytiva’s advances in logistics planning and scheduling technology. Hytiva systems use machine learning to schedule its staff and find the most efficient routes with combinations of orders to get to each customer efficiently, maximizing customer happiness. Historical data such as distance matrices, drive times, and order probabilities add another level to the system, allowing the system to improve these plans by estimating future orders in an area, arranging routes to reduce average delivery times even more. Outside of cannabis, these capabilities are unheard of as common services like food cannot be delivered the same way and have far less challenges to the process from regulation, etc. Hytiva does what no other third party delivery technology can do for the cannabis industry.
Daniel Gozick, CTO of Hytiva Technologies, commented:
AI and Computer Vision are transforming the way businesses operate by providing them with fresh insights and enabling them to make informed decisions, improve customer service, and deliver personalized experiences.
Learn More About the Hytiva® Technology Suite of Services
Making a Brighter Future for the Cannabis Industry
Hytiva is already applying these same technologies and more to build the future of the industry. Building on its wealth of experience integrating with almost every technology vendor in the cannabis space, Hytiva is expanding its technology suite of services to serve all cannabis businesses.
- Businesses continued to be saddled with manual processes, such as counting products for inventory and updating statuses individually; problems ignored by vendors in the industry. Hytiva is solving these problems with computer vision based counting, bulk scanning, and bulk operations on matched items. Anyone working in positions of inventory, cannabis production, and shipping and receiving know the value these innovations bring.
- Government compliance and track & trace systems have the potential to create a lot of value in the industry for both regulators and the businesses of the cannabis industry, but the way they are implemented requires manual effort that often matches or even exceeds the time it takes to produce the products themselves. Hytiva is solving these problems with integration technology that greatly simplifies common processes such as package / lot management, automatic document generation and auditing, configurable automation tools, and more.
- Going back to its consumer focused roots, Hytiva has continued innovating its digital display and consumer facing kiosk technologies in the store, including predictive technology to help consumers find the products they are looking for and video, generated on the fly, with up-to-the minute data for products that are in-stock at that moment. The videos include lab data and pricing, attracting customers in an intelligent and dynamic way never seen before in traditional retail environments.
- Taking advantage of the recent progress, Hytiva has produced conversational AI based approaches to common operations, able to integrate them to any system where it serves the consumers and clients best.
Mike Kelp, President of Hytiva, shared:
I am proud of our use of AI, among all the other technologies, within the Hytiva portfolio of companies. We are not only constantly working to make the lives of our clients and cannabis consumers easier, but putting in the forethought and work required to create the most value for everyone without sacrificing the human values that make us the right team for so many to work with.
Respect and Human Values
The excitement AI brings also brings great debate around user privacy, security, controls, and more. Hytiva has already approached this debate by always implementing AI within its own systems, with no third-party vendors or servers involved, protecting user privacy. In addition, Hytiva Technologies requires all of its AI advancements to be explainable, meaning the system must be able to explain its actions in a human-understandable way. It is much more difficult to develop artificial intelligence algorithms with these rules, but the reward is a proven commitment to clients and consumers, while setting another standard that the cannabis industry can have professionalism beyond other industries despite the stigma surrounding the industry.
Conclusion
With the new public interest in conversational AI, Hytiva Technologies is uniquely poised to share more about the advancement it has already made in AI, and build on that momentum in a way that all participants in the cannabis industry will appreciate more than ever before. While most technology companies are rushing to AI in a buzz-word filled frenzy, Hytiva Technologies is focused on the cannabis industry’s future with real, effective uses of AI that respect the privacy and security of everyone.