The Edge July/August 2025

Photos: Threadleaf Landscape Design

Watruba says he uses ChatGPT for everything, including planning company parties. “Just every time I get an idea, I just throw it in there,”Watruba says. “It’s just crazy what it comes up with.” Hartshorn says she’ll also talk to ChatGPT at the end of the day about some of the issues she encountered at work. “It can give me some feedback on what I could do differently, or what I need to do to make that a better situ ation,” Hartshorn says. “Again, it’s about that next step. Ideally, it’s hooked up to my calendar so that it can block out time for me to do that kind of stuff as well. ACCESSING INSIGHTS AI can also be useful in analyzing data. Hartshorn says they have a custom GPT they use to review their quarterly financials. “It helps us with our long-term vision,” Hartshorn says. “It knows high-level ideas, and it can help us specify better steps going forward. It will say maybe look at more support on your internal instead of leaning on subcontractors because one day you want to do this and this. It will give more specific things if you’re able to give it that information.” Watruba says he’s working to turn his AI into a business partner. “You can use some products like Mind Cloud,”Watruba says. “They connect with Aspire, and you can actually send it reports, and it’ll crunch the data for you. One thing I want it to do is tell me my three weakest crews every week, and it’ll do it. You teach it what you want, and you’ll get an email showing, ‘Hey, here’s your three weakest crews on production.’ You don’t have to look at reports.”

something, but my time to market with our team is shorter, so I can then accomplish more things.” For instance, Rankin says the AI on his iPhone can summarize a batch of texts in a group chat. “If there’s a problem going on at a site, and you see 10 texts, instead of review ing all 10, it’ll give you a very accurate summary,” Rankin says. “It misses some of the details sometimes, but it will give you a very good baseline that if you’re in a meeting and you just have time to read 10 words, it will get you most of the way.” Rather than spending hours on mun dane tasks, AI can streamline processes and shave chunks of time off. Depending on your usage, it can save you anywhere from 30 to 75% of your time. Hartshorn says tapping into automa tion and integrating AI into their other systems is the key. “I do think that a lot of the time, peo ple think that AI is really awesome, but unless something can happen because of it, and it’s not just adding to their plate it’s not something that’s very usable at the end of the day,” Hartshorn says. Watruba says he doesn’t quantify it in terms of time savings, but rather, he is more productive now. When deployed strategically, AI frees you up to focus on other tasks. Rankin says one of the main ways his team uses ChatGPT is with frameworks. “The way that I’ve coached to be using it is to let it give you an outline,” Rankin says. “Let it give you the ideas. Let it give you a rough draft, but then it’s really where you got to go in and add the personal touches, where you have to add the specific information that maybe only you would know.”

Watruba says the hardest part is sim ply getting the necessary data into the system for it to process. Rankin says he’s dabbled with giving ChatGPT a set of financials and asking for its interpretation. He’s also given an acquisition target and asked if it was a good fit. “It struggled a little bit,” Rankin says. “I had to give it a few more prompts and a little bit more direction to get the information that I wanted, which then it almost felt counterintuitive that I was I was telling it the answer that I wanted it to give me, right?” SALES AND CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE ENHANCEMENTS AI is also being utilized by software companies to launch industry-specific tools for landscapers to help speed up the estimation process. Rankin says they use Simple Estimate, which utilizes AI to generate takeoffs for residential properties and provide leads with an immediate online quote. “You just simply plug in your service, address, name, phone number, email, so we get their information, and then it spits out that free quote for kind of all of our services,” Rankin says. Watruba is working on training his AI to help his estimators on budgeting for all the necessary items. “In other words, they don’t have to be like, ‘Oh, I forgot the nails,’”Watruba says. “It can prompt you to say, ‘Hey, what about this?’The estimators can be green and be prompted with all these things that only somebody with experience would know.”

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