Innovative Work Models for the Future with Ashley Wright

**SPEAKER_1** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media and programmatic ad experts.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:17)
Welcome back everyone to the Bliss Business Podcast. Today we'll talk about the workplace. It's no secret that the workplace is transforming at an unprecedented speed, predominantly driven by AI. And it's shifting the way employees work, their expectations and creating new demands for flexibility. In fact, research shows that 74% of companies are rethinking work models to remain competitive. The question is not whether change is coming, but how leaders will design work that sustains both people and performance. Today's guest is an investor-backed startup pioneering the use of AI to scale expertise in the green industry. We will discuss the risk of leaving AI out of small businesses, once driven by individual skill and expertise, how AI and human creativity and expertise can drive together, and why empathy and humility remain essential to any innovative work model. Please, Mike, introduce our guest today.

**Mike Liwski** (1:23)
Oh, Tullio, I am delighted to, and I know our guests are going to really look forward to this conversation. So our guest today is Ashley Wright. She's the founder and CEO of Plantista. It's, as you mentioned, an investor-backed startup pioneering the use of AI to scale expertise in the green industry. Now, Ashley has been featured on Nasdaq, AP News, NBC, Fox, WGN and Forbes for Plantista's groundbreaking integration of AI into the garden retail and landscape design industry. So now she's also leading the charge in modernizing the green industry with tools that make scaling expertise possible while keeping sustainability really at the core, which we know is critical. So Ashley, we're still looking forward to the conversation today. Welcome to our show.

**Ashley Wright** (2:19)
Thanks so much, Mike. Super excited to be here.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:22)
Excellent. So Ashley, you are transforming literally an entire industry by blending AI with sustainable practices. What inspired you to build Plantista and how has your journey shaped your view of the future of work?

**Ashley Wright** (2:40)
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate the question. And it goes back quite, quite away. So I actually grew up in this industry in small town, Illinois, way back when my mom had a high school education. She was laid off from the factory that she worked at when I was in second grade. And the state of Illinois actually had a program at the time where they would pay for you to receive an associate's degree if you didn't have any education beyond high school. So she chose a horticultural landscape design degree.
And my mother is incredibly smart, incredibly intelligent. She's never been very bookish. We joke. So she used to pay my sister and I to do her assignments for her. And I would do worksheets. I was the younger sister. So I got the worksheets, got paid up to five bucks a pop for a worksheet. My sister did the papers. And I joke that was really my entrance into this industry. From there, she worked part time at different garden centers. She would bring me with her when I didn't have a babysitter, which was most of the time in the summer. So I would help out in the garden centers, follow her around to different landscape design calls. And then ultimately, my parents actually started a garden center business when I was in seventh grade. And I was obsessed with being in every single business meeting, helping them start that up, et cetera. So it is really, I would say, like near and dear to my heart. And this industry is very, it's very privatized and very, it's these family owned businesses that have been around for generations and passed down through generations. And there's just so much heart and soul in the industry. But fast forward, I ended up leaving the industry for about 20 years.
I got my undergrad degree, did some marketing at General Mills, got my business degree from UCLA, did growth strategy consulting with McKinsey and worked for some different startups, et cetera. But ultimately ended up coming back into this industry about two years ago due to three to five things, we'll say, or a handful of things. So number one, I noticed that and read that there were all of these new entrants into the green industry as a result of COVID. So the data says that over 18 million new folks entered this industry of plants as a result of COVID. However, the industry pretty much failed them. There weren't really tools on how to take care of your plants or how to place plants together, which plants you should be using. And this industry is inherently un-Googleable. So it was this big opportunity that I really feel like wasn't fully leveraged. So that was one and I started thinking, how do I fix this? How do I help the IGCs grow? And when I say IGC, I just mean independent garden center. Yeah. And so I started talking to some of these garden centers and I learned something really important, which was that they had finally recently computerized their inventory. So this might sound crazy if you're in an industry like retail, etc., where everything is computerized for a long time. However, in this industry, up until about five years ago, you would go outside, you would see which plants looked low, you would call up your stock guy or gal, and you would order it. So it really didn't give tech a way to be able to see into the industry and to help. So that changed about five to 10 years ago. So that was interesting that got the wheels turning. I think another big thing here, this industry is largely handing down from the second generation to the third generation, where the second generation might have been a little bit opposed to technology or different tools beyond their point of sale system. That third generation is coming in and they're like, what the heck? Where are the tools? How do I run this business if I don't have technology for it? Then the final thing is that AI, and I saw this from the other industries I was working in, in Gross Strategy Consulting, that AI is in a place to really scale expertise. We're in this really special time where AI can scale expertise. That really has been the competitive advantage of IGCs, of these landscape designers, but they haven't been able to scale it in the past, beyond a certain point. With that, I ended up pulling on a co-founder, one of the smartest people I knew in tech, and said, let's tackle this. Let's use AI to really scale expertise here. That's when we built Plantista.