Crafting Your Wine Experience with Firstleaf Founder Philip James - 011

Join Brandon Amoroso as he explores the dynamic world of online alcohol sales with Philip James, the visionary founder of Firstleaf, on The DRINKS.com Podcast. Delve into Philip's journey from the UK to pioneering the digital wine industry in the US, and uncover the innovative approach of Firstleaf in personalized wine recommendations. From discussing wine production intricacies to navigating the challenges of brand loyalty and the impact of the pandemic on the industry, Brandon and Philip offer invaluable insights. Discover the transformative role of technology, including Firstleaf's mobile app and the use of generative AI, in reshaping industries and adapting to evolving market dynamics. Gain a profound understanding of the intricate interplay between technology, consumer behavior, and industry evolution in this captivating episode.

Topic timestamps:

🍇 Introduction to Firstleaf and Philip James (00:00:00)

🍾 Simplifying Wine Selection for Consumers (00:02:40)

🧪 Personalization and Recommendation Algorithms (00:06:24)

🍇🔬 Science Behind Wine Personalization (00:08:01)

🍷🔒 Challenges of Brand Loyalty in Wine (00:18:04)

📦 Future Trends in Wine Packaging and Retail (00:16:36)

🚀 Exciting Prospects for 2023 Amidst Pandemic Recovery (00:20:00)

💼 Effects of the Pandemic on Consumer Behavior and Supply Chains (00:26:39)

💪 Resilience and Adaptation of Businesses During the Pandemic (00:28:43)

🔄 Rapid Shifts and Technological Advancements Shaping Industries (00:30:57)

🤖 Utilization and Implications of Generative AI in Business Operations (00:35:00)
📱 Ways to Connect with Philip James and Closing Remarks (00:36:21)

Philip James

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipjames/
Sampl - https://drinksampl.com/
Region - https://drinkregion.com/

Brandon Amoroso:

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonamoroso/
Web - https://brandonamoroso.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bamoroso11/
X - https://twitter.com/AmorosoBrandon

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey everyone, thank you for listening to the Drinkscom podcast the business of online alcohol. I'm your host, brandon Amoroso, and today I'm talking with the founder and CEO of First Leaf, philip James, and First Leaf is a personalized D2C wine club. Thank you for coming on the show, brandon. Yeah, thank you for having me. So, before we hop into some of the topics we want to cover today, can you just give everybody a quick background on yourself and Firstleaf?

Speaker 2: 0:35

Yeah, of course. So I grew up in the UK and moved to the US for graduate school and ever since graduating with my MBA, I've been in the online wine industry. Uh, so that's all the way back since 2005. Um and uh, you know what? It's funny I thought kind of the internet was fully baked back then. You know, even Amazon was 10 years old. Ebay, amazon, like all these big ones, were more than a roughly a decade old at that point. Uh, that point, but obviously, in terms of online wine, it was like nascent.

Speaker 2: 1:08

Right back then, a winery could only ship to 10 states. Um, you know, I think maybe a billion dollars of wine was sold online. Uh, and kind of fast forward to today. Uh, wineries can ship nearly nationwide, or effectively nationwide 47 states now, and you know, I think the industry is four or five, six times bigger than it was back then. So I started my first company in 2006, 2007, I think, and I've started a few since then and they've all been focused on the same consumer problem, but with different kind of back-end solutions, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2: 1:53

And so, starting with Snuth Lot18 in the middle and ending now, obviously, where I am with First Leaf, and so in all cases, it is me coming into the industry not as a wine person at first and never really understanding why it had to be so complicated. You know why the consumer I don't know the consumer always feels like misjudged. Right, I still don't like picking wine in a restaurant. You know I find it hard to choose wine in a grocery store. There's so much choice on the shelf or on the list and so little relevant information to help the consumer make a choice, and so I've always tried to help a consumer find a wine that matches their taste, and at first I tried to do that solely through software, and then gradually that evolution up the first leaf where we said look to do it properly, to do it completely. We think we have to make the wine handle the e-commerce and do the sort of software based recommendations to help the consumer.

Speaker 1: 3:00

Yeah, I think one of the benefits to online is you can curate it more specifically than a shelf in a retail shop or a wine list at a restaurant, and it is pretty overwhelming. No-transcript. Oh, you know, we've got a lot of this wine. We really need to push it this week type of deal versus you know, actually thinking about what sort of flavor profile would go with you know your food or you know what your preferences might be.

Speaker 2: 3:38

You know? I mean, the question I hear a consumer ask an expert most commonly is do you like it Right? What do you like, right? So someone is in a store and and you know, unless you've, you know, unless you're a sommelier, unless you've been trained W set course or something like that, you know why would you know how a tannin is different than you know acids or mouthfeel, or or fruitiness and sweetness? I mean, these are words that you, you learn over time and we know what the words are, right. But you learn what that taste is and how to discern it in the wine, and most people don't have that lexicon, right? And so a consumer, uh, will say to the sommelier you know, just tell me one that you like, right? But I mean, that's kind of ridiculous really, right? What's the point of having all of this choice if you just, as a consumer, have to give up, right? And instead of knowing how to explain what you might like and someone giving you an actual recommendation in person, you just get something that somebody else likes. I mean again, what's the point, right? You might as well. At that point, you might as well just pick randomly Probably everything on the list and probably everything in the store is good to somebody, right? Somebody likes it, that's why it's there, right? And so you might as well just close your eyes and pick it. Like asking somebody else what they like, you might as well just close your eyes and pick at random. And so, yeah, obviously online makes that easier because you know who the person is, where they live, you have their purchase history For us.

Speaker 2: 5:05

We ask consumers to tell us if they like a wine or not. They can also get on the phone and talk to one of our wine concierge and actually dial in their account and kind of have a 10, 20-minute conversation back and forth and like, oh, I didn't realize you didn't like highly tannic wines. Let's make sure we remove those off the top, or for whatever reason. You don't like French wine? Hey, no problem, we'll just make sure you never get a French wine. And so, you know, trying to help people find a wine they like, while knowing that they don't necessarily have the language, you know the words to describe their own taste, that's hard right. Like, try and describe a fragrance to me. Like, if you don't work in that world, good luck describing that's musk, that's vanilla, that's something else. That's hard right. I mean I can't explain music. I know what I like, but I don't know the words to explain it.

Speaker 1: 5:58

Yeah, and I think you know one of the unique advantages to online is that you can actually dig into that, create that one-to-one relationship with a customer in a way that you're not getting in a retail store or at a restaurant. But what are some of the ways that you're tackling that problem? Specifically with Firstleaf Because you mentioned software You're obviously selling through an online sales channel. What does that actually look like in practice?

Speaker 2: 6:29

So there's a few things that I think kind of sum up to the service and the whole personalization that we offer. The first one is, when a consumer shows up and creates an account, we ask them to take this sort of basic onboarding quiz, right, and that helps us understand how much they know about wine, if there are certain things they know they like or don't like. So certain styles of wine, you know, region, grape combinations, and then some sort of maybe simpler questions around the kinds of foods they like, right. So that gives us a pretty good match, but it obviously's not perfect, right. That's just we haven't, they haven't tried a wine and they haven't given us actual feedback on the wine. But but it helps, you know triangulate reasonably well. Um, the second way is, over time, as they receive wines from us, they can rate those. You know, simple thumbs up or thumbs down, and then that narrows it in. I talked about at some point. I talked about if someone wants to get on the phone and talk to the wine concierge and like manually, accelerate that and dial in the account faster, they can do that, and then that's all the front end. That's what the consumer sees, right.

Speaker 2: 7:37

And then behind the scenes, what we're doing. We run our own lab and we use something called a FOSS machine, that's an infrared spectroscopy machine. So basically the big machine looks like a fridge turned on its side and it's what our algorithm and personalization runs off of, right. So this machine basically blasts an infrared light at a test tube of the wine and tells you which frequencies reflect back and which ones pass through. Uh, so my master's thesis, uh, was in a very similar technology, a chemistry master's, but actually our winemaker has our head winemaker has a PhD actually in this infrared spectroscopy science, in that machine, and so our algorithm runs off it, our recommendations run off it.

Speaker 2: 8:34

That information is really important back to the winemakers in terms of what we should buy and how a wine should be finished to match a style that a certain group of consumers would like, and so it's the core of what goes on behind the scenes. And so I think what we're good at is we ask pretty basic questions. So do you like sweet red wine, or do you like sweeter food, or do you know you like oaky chardonnay, yes or no? And most people can answer those questions. But that kind of belies the complexity of what's going on behind the scenes. And so wine is complex, right, I mean wine is at least a thousand different grapes from at least a thousand different regions, and often in a store there could be a thousand or five thousand different bottles on the shelf pretty hard to pick from from that complexity. We're doing a lot of math behind the scenes but trying to present it to the consumer in a really, uh, simple and approachable way yeah, it's.

Speaker 1: 9:35

It's crazy to me how much choice there is, but also how much science goes into you know the creation of um.

Speaker 1: 9:42

You know a bottle of wine and there's, you know definitely. You know from, from the various win um, you know a bottle of wine and there's, you know definitely. You know from. From the various wineries that I visited, there's some that are super advanced when it comes to uh, you know, you're basically almost making the wine in a lab, it seems like at some properties and then at others it's very much so like you know natural, uh, the way it. It's very much so like you know natural, the way it you know used to be done for, you know, for centuries. I don't know if there's necessarily a you know a right or wrong way, but it is fascinating to me that you can basically engineer, you know a wine to fit somebody's flavor profile. You know pretty specifically Um, and so I'm assuming that you know for most of your wines, there's, you know you're, you're going the private label route and you're um. You know crafting based off of. You know the feedback that you're getting from, from your customers.

Speaker 2: 10:36

So everything we sell, we make, uh, and and so the, the, the brands and the brand identity, the label and the packaging, all of that's designed in-house. And we both will buy on contract from vineyards as well as through brokers and kind of the spot market. In some cases we have long-term contracts that run multiple years. In some cases we have long-term contracts that run multiple years and we buy from wineries you would have heard of, but we also buy from wineries that are smaller, family-owned, multi-generation, and in some cases we can say exactly who the source is, and in some cases we don't. You know, and look, the terroir, the varietal, clone, the grape, the farming, the harvesting, the fermenting, all of that's really important, right. But there's also, you know, for us, out of hundreds of thousands of different choices, we have to pick which vineyard, which grape, right, which, uh, which year. We have to pick those things, um, and then then the, the blend, right, sometimes a hundred percent, but some, some of the wines are red blend, or 50, 50, right that we'll make all these, you know, different blends and and so, uh for sure, there's a lot of science before we pick up the wine, so the farming and the harvesting, but then there is also that science that occurs after we pick it up, right, the blending, the aging, the finishing and so on. And so, yeah, the science is used. The math and science and so on is useful for us at both.

Speaker 2: 12:23

Just think of how it's different for a traditional winery, right, if you're a Napa winery, you buy some Napa land, maybe, and you put a building on it. That's not how a lot of wine is made, right? A lot of the wine is made. You'll visit a Napa winery and then they might have a wine from Monterey. Maybe they own the wine, the land in Monterey, maybe they don't, maybe they buy from other vineyards, and there's a lot of vineyards out there, the growers out there, that don't want to be involved in the marketing and the branding and the selling of the wine. And so the wine industry is a lot more complicated behind. I mean, you know this, of course, but the industry is a lot more complicated and disaggregated behind the scenes than the average consumer thinks.

Speaker 2: 13:05

Right, the consumer shows up at a winery on a weekend, tastes the wine and sees a vineyard out back, and they assume that everything comes from that vineyard. But not many wineries do that. If they do that, they put the word estate on the bottle and I'm not sure what the exact percentage is, but I'm sure it's less than 5%, maybe less than 1% or 2% of wine is estate, right, and you know, even big, famous brands are maybe growing some but buying some and sort of blending it, you know, as they go to create that consistent style, style. So there's a lot of uh, uh like science that has to go in, even before they take it to the lab, right, and, like you said, the lab is the room next to the barrel room, right, and some labs have, you know, a couple of machines and some labs, you know, actually look like a real laboratory. Uh, and every winery kind of picks where they go on that spectrum.

Speaker 2: 14:06

But it is ultimately an incredibly complex product with hundreds of different chemicals in it, molecules in it. Those are all natural, right, they're from the grape, they're from the yeast and the fermentation and they're from the barrel and kind of nothing else, but it's still a product with hundreds and hundreds of different molecules in it. And so the science of taste is super complicated, right, just like, again, fragrance or music or something like that. Uh, but it's crazy how something with so few ingredients I mean less than five right Um can create a product with so much variability and and subtlety and nuance.

Speaker 1: 14:47

Yeah, and it's crazy how much the label and the packaging and you know all that goes into. You know consumer choice when it, you know when they're deciding what they're going to purchase, but also their perception or idea of you know what it's going to taste like. Like, if I'm in a store and I see you know like an old school Bordeaux style label and bottle, and if you pick it up and it's like heavier, maybe it has like a larger punt as well, I think, oh, you know this is going to be, you know, expensive. You know more classic, tangible, dry. You know more classic, traditional drive. If I see you know one of those like nouveau.

Speaker 1: 15:26

You know crazy labels, maybe it's like AR, uh, you know, uh, enabled as well. Um, a cork, uh, not a cork, a a twist, a twist off versus a, versus a cork. You know my mind immediately goes to you know cheaper, maybe more approachable, like fun and fruity or something like that. And that initial perception feed so much into what the taste actually ends up being. Because your mind is so powerful and like creating, you know what that flavor profile might be like. If you tell somebody, oh, it's going to taste like this, they're probably going to taste.

Speaker 2: 16:05

You know, whatever you just told them, it's going to taste like the and what you're describing is still 750 ml round glass bottles, right, and I know there's cans and boxes and tetra pack and other stuff. But you know how long before the ttb allows wineries to make wine outside of 750. I don't mean 500 or 1.5 or 1 liter, but you know, every now and then they consider making allowing any size. So instead of 750 you could have 700 or 720 or 730. And you know how long before wine ends up like fragrance or bottled water where, when you look at the shelf, there's like all kinds of stuff. Right, you can get bottled water in plastic but you can also get it in glass and you know slightly different sizes and squeezable or fancy vos that you might put on a table like a decanter. Almost. Fragrance right, every fragrance basically has a different glass mold and so you know, I think there will be more and more like. But for retail particularly right, this isn't as relevant for us because we're selling first leaf as a service first of all, and then the bottles that come in the box of what we provide as the service. You sign up for Spotify because you want music on demand, right, you don't really look through their catalog and decide who has the richer catalog before you pick a music service. So we have to sell first leaf Right. But for wineries that sell on the shelf, I mean, you know, when there's a thousand things and you all have similar packaging, like you said, you have to differentiate on the label and the brand. But I think over time there's going to be more and more people really pushing to differentiate on the bottle, the packaging, you know, outside of the label itself, uh, and fragrance and water I think of of I mean water particularly right, where it's all the same. I know there's minerality, but other than that it's basically all the exact same. And people have a preferred water brand, right, they have a preferred vodka brand. They certainly have a preferred fragrance.

Speaker 2: 18:12

And you know, I think wine historically hasn't had great brand identity. Wine does, but not the individual brands. When you think how people shop, a lot of people say you know, I like Cabernet Sauvignon and I'll pay $20. Or I love New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. Most people are not shopping by brand. They're saying they want a region and a grape right or a price range and a grape. But you don't really say that with vodka right. You go in and you say I want Smirnoff or Absolute. You don't say I'm looking for a $20 vodka.

Speaker 2: 18:47

So people have brand identity or brand loyalty in many other categories, and it exists in wine. Maybe somebody walks in and they're a yellowtail drinker or barefoot wine drinker, but usually no, and most people are absolutely open to, like, the power of substitution suggestion, right, oh, you love cloudy bay. We don't have that, but here's a different new zealand sauvignon blanc and it's similar and you'll love it. Uh, it's hard to do that in vodka, right, you either want absolute vodka or nothing. I think, um, you know, here's a different vodka, but like no, you're brand loyal. And so I think one of wine's challenges with its so many products out there, uh, the average winery brand is small, right, lower budget, it's hard to build loyalty at the brand level, anyway. But like I said, firstleaf has a different challenge and opportunity. We're trying to get people to believe in Firstleaf. You know the service, which is we'll pick the wine, we'll also get it to your door, and you know all the other stuff that goes into the service than just you know just the bottles and the wine itself.

Speaker 1: 20:00

What are you know, what are some of the things that you're excited about um for this year? Uh, that you know. You think you're uniquely positioned to capitalize on because you are selling, you know, online and direct to consumer. You know something that you know a lot of producers aren't necessarily privy to or able to take advantage of.

Speaker 2: 20:23

You know I think this. To me, this is the. This marks the end of the pandemic and, and you know there's a bit of an arbitrary line deciding when the end of the pandemic really is. But you know, 20, I started the company in 20, we launched in 2016. And in hindsight, those first few years were were more predictable. Time didn't feel so at the time, but then 2020 came and I realized I missed, you know, 2016 to 2019. And maybe the pandemic itself was over sooner, but the effects from the pandemic were not right. So the supply chain challenges in 2021 and 2022 were crazy, right. Interest rates are high.

Speaker 2: 21:10

You know, a lot of wineries, I think, ended up with sort of too much stock. Or you know, for us, we import a lot of wine and containers. Or you know, for us, we import a lot of wine and and containers. Shipping a container of wine used to cost like three thousand dollars, but briefly, it was nearly twenty thousand dollars, and so kind of working through that is pretty much done now, and so for me, this is our first like clean and hopefully predictable year since 2020. And so it's nice to be able to focus back on like the basics basically right. So focusing on the consumer and the value proposition and the actual business and not reacting to these external events that you know I felt like you know, we're a small boat in a giant ocean being whipped around by things that were happening to us, so we're spending a lot of time this year focusing on the breadth of the portfolio. You know there's a lot of really good wine out there right now.

Speaker 2: 22:04

We are putting a lot of energy into our mobile app. We launched that last year and that's good both for Firstleaf members. So manage your account, your next delivery, next delivery rate, a wine, pull up the information, uh. But we're also building out this library of third-party wines that you can, uh, you can scan somebody else's wine, right, like a, like a liquor store or grocery store, and you can pick up a bottle and scan the barcode and we'll tell you, based on our personalization, if we think it's a good match for you.

Speaker 2: 22:38

You know, and I really like that because to believe and then try first leaf today, you have to believe two things are true, right, you have to believe our recommendations will work for you and you have to believe that the wine we have is good.

Speaker 2: 22:55

And you have to believe those things at the same time. Right, then you sign up and create an account. But if you download the mobile app, you can play with and try the recommendations in some other setting. You can try it on your wine at home, you can try it at a friend's barbecue, you can try it in a grocery store and I think, if the recommendations are good, we've helped you, we've created something that can help you even without you putting your credit card down and paying for the service. So I love the idea that we can take our technology and kind of open it up and push it out to people who I think over time will want to try first-leaf wines, but separating the two pieces so you can play with the recommendations first and then decide later if you want to try our wine yeah, no, that's exciting.

Speaker 1: 23:44

um, I think the the the 2021 to 2023, like covid period, was uh crazy for industries. You, you know, beyond just wine, I mean pretty much any industry had crazy supply chain woes. There was a lot of overbuying, then underbuying. Then, you know, on pretty much no ability, at least from like the marketing standpoint, to do year over year comparables or even month over month, because you know it's just completely different, like dynamic that you're operating within and so, like you know, looking's just completely different, like dynamic that you're operating within and so, like you know, looking at even performance for this year of, like the marketing agency. For, you know, for some of our clients, it's very challenging to have a real baseline. I feel like this is the year that you'll be able to set that baseline again and then be able to, you know, move forward and improve, versus trying to compare it to a year where, you know, people were quite literally forced to shop online.

Speaker 2: 24:48

And not just so. You're right. I mean, the comparisons are crazy, but it's not just the people were forced to shop online, it's that they bought different things. I mean, I have a giant piece of exercise equipment at home, but now I can go back to the gym, right. So in 2020, I bought a home rowing machine. I don't know if I would have bought that today.

Speaker 2: 25:07

Certainly everybody bought cooking equipment, and lots of people bought you know-home desks or office furniture, or people purchase new couches. Everybody was at home all the time, right, and now the balance of how people spend their money shifts, right, people are back out traveling, doing other stuff and so, yeah, I mean, a lot of wine companies had too much inventory but, like you said, a lot of other companies end up with a bit of the wrong inventory. Right now is now is not the best time to sell someone a couch or a desk, and maybe it's a better time to sell someone I don't know luggage or something different, right? And so you know, there's been a lot of um, uh, uh like derivative effects from the pandemic, and I think most consumers think the pandemic ended, I don't know, two years ago, right? Vaccines, lockdowns, like that stuff is all in the past. Now COVID is still around, right, but its effects are less than it used to be. But I think for a lot of companies the effects are still present, right On the inventory and supply chain and so on. And so, yeah, I, I think so far it's only february, right, but so far it's like a clean year, um, but you're, it's weird.

Speaker 2: 26:24

What's the comparison I mean for us? I do try to compare to pre-pandemic, although it's ridiculous. I have investors and they don't love it when I tell them let's do a comparison to four years ago. But we are more than twice the size that we were in 2019. We've been profitable since 2020, every year. You know we're debt free and so in that arc of lockdowns and supply chain, you know there's ebb and flow and up and down, but, point to point, pre pandemic to post pandemic you know we're definitely a bigger, you know, um, more sound, you know a better company, um, but that's a longer comparison than most investors love to hear about, right?

Speaker 2: 27:11

They want to hear how this quarter is versus last quarter, not how we are today versus 2019.

Speaker 1: 27:17

Yeah, yeah, I think you know it's more resilient. Businesses, though, have come out of COVID. If you were able to survive, you know, that period, which a lot of businesses were not able to, you know you definitely have some battle scars from it, but if you were able to handle, you know, every day was a new sort of dynamic, with which you're working within Now is like a breath of fresh air, even though, like for e-com, at least for a lot of our clients. You know total sales are lower than what they were in like 2022. They might be coming in different channels, but your Shopify sales aren't necessarily as high as they were when everybody was quite literally forced to shop online, but it's less like helter skelter and everything is more streamlined and you're able to focus on how to actually grow the business versus how to just keep it alive, given all the changing conditions.

Speaker 2: 28:14

Yeah, and look, it's an unfair comparison to say how are sales wherever not for us but for anyone today versus when lockdowns, like you said, were compulsory basically. So that's a bit of a weird comparison, right, but I like that the metrics in general start to feel normal again. The channels we're in, the price, the CPA, the prices, the consumer behavior it's all starting to look a bit more predictable. And yeah, there were, you know, there were crazy effects during the last few years, but the margin structure, the cost structure, like things, start to look normal. They remind me of how they were in 2019. You know, but I think the ripples from the pandemic will go on at least to the end of this decade.

Speaker 2: 29:05

Think of how many people work from home now versus before. Think of how the default for a business meeting is like a Zoom call, whereas the default used to be I get on a plane and fly to the vendor, and so I think it's something like 20 to 25 percent of people work from home to some degree now, but pre-pandemic that was three percent, right, and so I'm sure the impact on San Francisco is always in the news. Maybe New York City commercial real estate, you know, I think a lot of. There's still a lot of disruption, right? All the people that moved out of those kinds of cities and moved into whether it's Texas or Florida or other states. I mean there's a big change.

Speaker 2: 29:48

I don't think everybody's fully understood, right? So more people at home means more people can get home delivery, but that's also terrible for I don't know public transport or what happened to like the salad bar in Manhattan or or the dry cleaning place in in Manhattan. I don't dress up as often as I used to. You know, I used to have to put on a shirt and go to see clients a lot, and I don't do that very much anymore.

Speaker 1: 30:14

Yeah, it was just like massive shifts.

Speaker 1: 30:16

I feel like that.

Speaker 1: 30:17

You know, maybe 50 years ago things would happen in you know, longer periods of time, whereas if you look at just the last four years alone, um, there's been dramatic shifts in, you know, weeks, not you know months, not even years.

Speaker 1: 30:33

And so, as a, as a business, you have to be able to, you know, adjust very rapidly and be pretty dynamic and, and you know, the world is becoming more interconnected and global and people aren't, as you know, stuck within wherever they currently are, in the sense of, you know, a lot of businesses had the opportunity during COVID to ask you know, why is our footprint in this particular area? Why couldn't it be, you know, elsewhere or why couldn't it be in multiple different places? And then, even looking at the dynamic between the employee and the employer, that's shifted like four times in the past three years, where, you know, the employees had a ton of power, then it went back to the employer, then it was the employees and it's the employer again, with, you know, layoffs and not having layoffs. It's, you know, it's definitely not an industry for people who don't like to be nimble or on their toes.

Speaker 2: 31:29

You know, but I mean how many industries are going to be left that aren't affected by technology? I mean there's less and less and less, and even farming Right, which are, like that's going to be the last to get affected by technology. I mean the stuff that exists out there, right, optical sorters for grapes Unbelievable. I mean there's so much faster than a human can do it and they can spot the bad grape and, like, puff it out the way with a 3D blast of air. And people used to say that you know they wouldn't use mechanical harvesting. So the machines like the tall tractors, basically, that can roll down the vines and you know, unless it's hillside, a lot of people will use those now and look, and some technology is good. A lot of people will use those now and look, and some technology is good.

Speaker 2: 32:15

I think it was something like 10% of wine was corked back in the day, right, but now the way that cork is, I don't know, washed, right, the actual cork, the way it's cleaned, I guess they don't really have that. Whatever TCA is, I'm not sure if it's a bacteria, I think it is, um, so that TCA bacteria doesn't really really exist. I mean it exists but it's not like I don't know. It's instead of one in 10 corks, it's one in a million corks or something, I'm not sure the actual data. But like, hey, some technology is good, right, and and and reaches into even you know the sort of slowest industries to adopt it. I'm really I mean, for a year now I've really been pushing my team on generative AI, which is so useful. You know, kind of up and down the entire stack, right, we use it on the actual website. So when a consumer logs in, there's a thing we create called wine print, which is sort of like your personalized analytics. Generative AI writes the copy on that page and they do it in a because we need it to be basically unique, right, we can't write all the versions by hand. So generative AI takes the data input and spits back out the sentences that we show the consumer. So, hey, I like wines that are medium acid, high tannin, you know, lower alcohol and you can show a sommelier and be like show, you know, get me this. Right, we talked about the challenge people have in a grocery store. That's what we're trying to help solve, you know, with with wine print.

Speaker 2: 33:54

But we use it behind the scenes. We use it for image generation, copy generation. We use it to analyze consumer feedback, right, so we get too many emails. Or, if we send out a survey, we get too many responses to like, we read them all but you can't really get the sentiment of them. It's a bit like like a word cloud or a tag cloud, right? You need to understand, like, what the feedback is, and generative AI can read it and spit you out a summary, right? So people have issues around shipping or people have issues around whatever else price or whatever else. The thing is you can get the summary from that data so much better and faster than the idea of having someone read know, someone read 5,000 responses and try to count how many mentioned the word shipping.

Speaker 1: 34:38

That's kind of like what Google is doing with its generative search and you know, if you Google something now, you can get that blurb at the top. That basically just takes you know the hundreds of thousands of results that Google has and then gives you a nice little you nice little description without you having to click into 10 different articles, which is a big disruptor when it comes to SEO. But for the customer or for the searcher it's a significantly better experience.

Speaker 2: 35:05

Yeah, look, and I know of course, people worry that tech takes their job. But I think, generally using generative like, you need someone to use the generative AI and make sure it makes sense, right, because if you just let it spit it back out, you know you get the images where someone has five arms and seven fingers, right, so you still get junk come comes back out of it. Uh, so you know, I'm really pushing my team to be the user of it rather than have it replace their job, right, like, if you don't embrace it, it will replace your job. But if you embrace it, there's always going to need to be people who train it or work with it or or edit it or oversee it. And so, you know, I like the description that it's like.

Speaker 2: 35:52

Generative AI is like having infinite high school interns. Those high school interns need a lot of oversight because you can't just let them run the company, right, and so, yeah, maybe one day it becomes infinite college grads and you know I should worry, but at the moment it still absolutely needs a human layer on top to interpret it or prompt it. But you know it's out there and you either have to use these things or let them pass you by.

Speaker 1: 36:21

And it makes me far more efficient and productive, and you know, I look at it as a I'm able to do more now than less, and I think you know that's the way that people need to approach it. But this is a super insightful conversation. I really appreciate you coming on, is there, you know? Before we hop, though, where can people you know who are listening find you, connect with you online?

Speaker 2: 36:48

Well, Firstleaf is easy to find. That's just firstleafcom and I'm Philip James. Easiest way is to find that's just firstleafcom and I'm Philip James. Easiest way is to find me on LinkedIn and connect. But yeah, Brandon, thank you very much for having me here.

Speaker 1: 37:01

Yeah, of course. Thank you. Well, for everyone else listening, as always, this is Brandon Moroso. You can find us at drinkscom. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.