With wineries practically betrothed to spreadsheets, early-2000s websites, and stodgy cursive fonts plucked straight from a Jane Austen character’s trembling hands, is it any surprise that our industry is behind in adopting useful AI tools with the capacity to make our businesses efficient and profitable?

Despite all appearances to the contrary, given that first paragraph – this isn’t another post trying to shame the industry into adapting. A well-connected bev alc professional need only scroll LinkedIn for about two seconds for a hearty dose of “stop complaining; this is your fault” novellas on the state of alcohol sales today.

 No; the intent here is to empower you: to suggest that the AI tools available to us right now are not only developed enough, but so easily adoptable that taking action today might just be enough to usher you and your team into a sound night’s sleep for the first time since, perhaps, “the before times” pre-pandemic.

It would be foolish to keep operating the same way we did half a century ago. Adept as we are at agonizing over our own mortality, we somehow fail to apply the same existential urgency to our business practices in a world that changes very, very quickly.

Is it any surprise automation has failed to resonate with winemakers and distillers, careful stewards of ancient arts?

In Wine & Spirits, it makes sense that we struggle to relinquish control to artificial intelligence on the business end; so much of our focus in production is on uncompromising perfection, resisting anything that might threaten to dilute our creative vision. 

Successful marketing practice, on the other hand, often entails split testing (A/B testing) multiple variations of creative, treating our own ideas as entirely disposable and entrusting the promotion of our precious products (read: our babies) to the publishing equivalent of a pump-action shotgun in the algorithm’s hands.

Hesitation Warranted; Help Wanted

Admittedly, AI’s usefulness is still very much emerging; there’s merit to questioning whether or not Chat GPT’s tenth-grade-essay bravado is really enough to strike deep resonance with your ideal customers.

On one side of the fence, certain hiring managers/recruiters take a “burn the fleet and never look back” approach to AI, rejecting every applicant who doesn’t seem to bow down and worship emerging technology as the only way forward.

Then, there are the experienced applicants, with an acute awareness of AI’s shortcomings in the shadow of their own skill set, keeping a close eye on new tools as potential competitors on one hand and a competitive advantage on the other. 

The answer is to wield these tools judiciously; to stay up to date and agile, open to potential benefits without gulping down the panacea pill with both eyes shut.

So what’s the practical application here? How are wineries and distilleries already using AI tools to conduct business more efficiently and eliminate costly manual processes?

Chat GPT (and Comparable Generative AI Tools)

Let’s begin with the tool(s) most familiar to the masses. Without getting tangled in the weeds of every possibility out there, have a look at some practical and immediately accessible ways to apply Chat GPT and any image generator (dealer’s choice) to the work your team is already doing to grow your wine and/or spirits business today:

• Brainstorming Campaign Ideas – Now, this one assumes you are, in fact, running any campaigns at all promoting your business. This is one area where Chat GPT, with all of its copywriting shortcomings, really shines: brainstorming ideas for your team to take and develop further. Need a list of 50 lead magnet ideas? Choose your top 3-5 favorites and develop those into full blown pieces of content. Use your audience’s hopes and fears as a guide; which one of these AI-generated ideas is most likely to help my customer get what they want and become the person they want to be? How is it going to enrich their lives and lead to self-actualization? This is the part your AI colleague is going to need help with — empathy.
• Copywriting (to be refined by your team) – AI can provide a great springboard, or starting point for your email campaigns, ad copy, labels, product and collection descriptions for your website. With paid/premium versions of these tools, you can (and should) actually create a persona out of your little AI co-writer; give the tool a brief on who they are (as a stand-in employee) and feed it as many materials as you can on your brand; then, when it’s time for it to crank out an email campaign selling organic Chilean wines from your estate, it has an idea of what brand voice to use and which lines to color inside.
• Marketing images – Need an image for a blog post or LinkedIn article? A photo of a cocktail recipe you came up with, but haven’t actually — ever — made? It’s incredibly easy to save time normally spent searching for the right stock photo or creating (or paying an agency to create) an original piece of content. While this isn’t recommended for everyone, when used sparingly and with some discernment, AI generated images make it possible to bypass many of the time consuming and expensive processes involved in promoting a sale, releasing a new product, and generally supporting all of your marketing efforts from your webstore to social media and email campaigns. 
• Promotional videos – this can be especially useful in a B2B context, when your value proposition requires more in-depth explanation to an educated, niche audience. Explainer videos and product releases come to life using stock video libraries and AI voice narration with a quick script. 
• Identifying Trends in Complex Data – Feed Chat GPT your depletion data or a spreadsheet and ask it identify patterns, callout highlights, and provide insights or areas for improvement. These tools are alarmingly good at extrapolating insights from massive bodies of data and summarizing those at a speed we could never hope to achieve ourselves. It’s like having an unpaid (yet somehow happy) analyst on your team! It gets better over time the more it learns what you care about and what you’re looking for.
• Ninja Meeting Prep and Communications – if you use an AI notetaker like Fathom, which not only recaps and summarizes everything that transpired, but also breaks down and organizes the content into agendas, follow up and frameworks like BANT —consider feeding these meeting summaries into Chat GPT and asking for high level, simple/digestible/concise communications for your next QBR or presentation. 

Most people are aware of these universal AI applications; it’s the niche, industry-specific solutions that aren’t yet on everyone’s radar that we’re here to highlight today.

Automated Distributor Billback/Invoice Management

Few in our industry know it, but the days of manual invoice entry and billback management are over. Using tools like Tradeparency’s AI Invoice Manager, wine & spirits suppliers are able to automatically match any incoming invoices to the deals in their system and catch any discrepancies to save money over time on billback errors.

 This frees your team members’ time to use their talents elsewhere, where you really need humans; they’ll be happier, freed from hours of drudgery, and your bottom line will benefit from their highly motivated, inspired new life actually using their rare and valuable skills. 

Maps & Route Planning

Beverage alcohol sales teams going door to door can also use AI-driven maps and route planning tools like Salesforce Maps or Lilypad to determine the most efficient way to use their time over the course of a week, given their goals. 

 Using logic like “show me all the accounts where I have an open objective and haven’t opened a new point of distribution in the last 12 months,” these tools can automatically plan out the most efficient route covering the highest priority accounts generated by users or dictated from the top-down.

Image Recognition

When a sales rep does make an account visit, simply snapping a photo of the backbar or shelf space at a package store location can help piece together what’s actually happening with your product(s) at the account level. 

 Rather than stand around asking “what part of the shelf am I on?”, AI-driven image recognition solutions enable reps to move on with their day. By analyzing all the images your reps collect in the field, image recognition does the heavy lifting with identifying your SKUs and drawing out actionable insights and suggested follow up in the accounts where you’re not on the shelf or accounts are not compliant with your trade promotions. 

Automated Planograms

AI planogram builders are making it easier than ever to save tremendous time and bandwidth optimizing shelf space using historical data. These tools ensure that you are fundamentally positioned to sell more – that your product is at the right place at the right time, at the right price.

From a sales perspective, if you see that you have 2/10 facings on the shelf (20%), but your products represent 60% of the total dollars sold, that gives your team the leverage to approach the retailer for more shelf space. Using AI to draw insights from the shelf (and inform future relays) allows your brand to be as strategic, efficient, and profitable as possible off premise.