Learning, Engagement, and Empowerment: 1-800-Flowers’ Amit Shah

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
Flowers are not digital products at all, but digital technologies like artificial intelligence can still offer considerable value to companies that sell non-digital products.
In today's episode, Amit Shah, president of 1-900-Flowers, describes how AI and machine learning, offered through a platform like 1-800-Flowers, can empower small companies to compete with much larger organizations. Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence in business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI. I'm Sam Ransbotham, professor of information systems at Boston College. I'm also the guest editor for the AI and Business Strategy Big Idea Program at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:47)
I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG, and I co-lead BCG's AI practice in North America. Together, MIT, SMR, and BCG have been researching AI for five years, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities across the organization and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:15)
Today, we're joined by Amit Shah. Amit is the president of 1-800-Flowers.
Amit, welcome. We're excited to learn more about what you're doing.

**Amit Shah** (1:22)
Thank you so much, Sam and Shervin. Great to be here.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:26)
Amit, we talked earlier and discovered that we all had some connection to the state of Georgia, you and Shervin and I.
But now you're in Long Island. You're the president of 1-800-Flowers. Tell us a little bit about your career path to get there.

**Amit Shah** (1:39)
So I started out as an analyst at McKinsey, which is very well known for helping teach problem-solvings both individually and collectively at scale and then worked at a range of startups in the northeast area and ended up being part of Liberty Media Pro-Flowers group at an early stage of my career and got very much involved, I would say, in the front seat of growth hacking. And that's what led me to sort of the current career as I've seen growth hacking and sort of the mindset of the hacker looking for the continuous change, continuous upliftment, and a continuous desire to provide the best customer experience actually both pre-vade and ultimately become the most critical element of any C-suite or boardrooms at large.

**Sam Ransbotham** (2:33)
Amit, starting in a marketing role and then transitioning to president, that marketing background must have made a difference. How has being from marketing affected your role as president?

**Amit Shah** (2:44)
That's a great question, Sam. Evolving into the role of leading multiple functions, departments, and colleagues outside of marketing, what really stands out is two key elements. The first thing is that I think marketing traditionally was seen as one of the functional competencies in empowering and accelerating problem solving.
Marketing is becoming a growth function and growth is becoming the key differentiator of companies. So I expect to continue to see an acceleration of marketing leaders actually taking on much more leadership responsibilities and ultimately starting to steer the ship because growth has become the essential currency and essential differentiator. So that is one vector.
And then I would say the second vector that informs me and prescient to our AI conversation is that I feel like people in the marketing sphere are actually much more contextually aware and contextually practicing advanced problem solving using machine learning than a lot of their peers. So I think there is a unique ability and a unique mindset that I bring to this leadership role as president of 1-800-Flowers, having been exposed to that quality and quantum of problem solving, which is surrounding a lot of growth and marketing leaders around us.

**Sam Ransbotham** (4:14)
Let's address the obvious question.
Flowers themselves aren't digital at all. How is 1-800-Flowers using digital data and AI in particular?

**Amit Shah** (4:22)
Currently, we are a platform of 15 brands. If you think about it, we are a platform that empowers engagement. We play along the full spectrum of human expression and engagement, starting from birthdays all the way to sympathy and everything in between.
That is who we are. We think that we have built an all-star range of brands to really power an engagement platform. If you think about what differentiates modern organizations, it is not just the ability to adopt technologies which has become a table stake, but the ability to out-solve their competitors in facing deep problems. When I think about AI, I think about our competitiveness on that frontier. Are we better problem solvers? I will give you a terrific example of that. When I started my career 20 years ago as a young analyst at McKinsey, there was a clear differentiator between people who are masters of Excel and who are not. It was a tool that empowered decision making at scale and communication of the decision making.