We Went to Where the Industry Lives
Every July, the horticulture industry gathers in Columbus, Ohio, for Cultivate, the largest horticultural conference in the nation. This is not a niche trade show. This is the room where the entire green industry decides what the next decade looks like.
The scale speaks for itself. Cultivate brings together over 3,000 organizations and more than 10,000 attendees, representing $60 billion in economic impact. This is an industry that was growing plants long before anyone had a website, and it is now larger, more concentrated, and more commercially sophisticated than most people outside of it realize.
Here is the tension worth sitting with: an industry that predates all modern technology is now standing at the front edge of the biggest shift in how consumers discover, decide, and buy. IM Digital went to Cultivate because we believe the green industry is not behind on this shift. It is uniquely positioned to win it. What follows are three conversations from the floor that explain why.
Creators Own Their Destiny
Justin sat down with Deja Amato from product marketing at Klaviyo at Cultivate.
Klaviyo's mission is to help business owners own their destiny. To Deja, owning your destiny means "the sky is the limit." You should be able to "dream up whatever you have in mind and have the tools to actually build it."
What makes Cultivate striking through this lens is the collision of timelines. This is an industry that existed before any technology. People were growing, buying, and building livelihoods around plants forever. Now that same industry is being brought closer to its customers by exactly the tools that once felt far removed and AI is closing that gap.
Horticulture is not optional. We live in an ecosystem and if technology can help these operators get ahead and do more, that does not just serve the industry. It serves humanity. The work ahead, as Deja framed it, is helping these businesses understand what customer data they can capture, how to turn it into richer and more impactful experiences, and how to stay competitive in a post-AI world.
Keep the Best of What You Already Have
The starting question is not "which tool should I buy?" It is "what do I need to provide for my customers?" and then backward-planning from those documented requirements. But the more important idea is how you adopt new technology without throwing away what already works.
The frame Justin Ragsdale, CRO of IM Digital, uses is the strangler fig. A strangler fig grows alongside a host tree, gradually surrounds it, and eventually stands on its own as a new tree. That is the right posture for AI adoption. It is not a rip-and-replace. It grows alongside what you already have and slowly becomes the new structure, without a violent cutover.
And here is the part that matters most for this industry. The old thing is the best thing. It is your people. It is your expertise. It is your tribal knowledge. It is the care you give to your customers and the care you give to your plants. The strangler fig approach lets you keep the best of what you already offer while you cultivate a new generation of technology and ways of working. The most important asset you already have is you and your people.
Through understanding exactly what you need to give your customers and what you need to build for the future. Only then does the technology question make sense. Justin's point is to start capturing the data and interactions people have with your brand and in the market, and use it to build a customer profile that answers a longer question: what kind of experiences will I need to provide my consumers ten years from now?
Technology grows around the expertise. It does not replace it.
The Consumer Is Being Rewired
But, how would your strategy change if you knew half your customers were already considering buying from you before they arrived? That is closer to reality than most brands assume. When shoppers arrive at a site from a source like ChatGPT, they can be several times more likely to convert. It is a small group today. It is growing fast. And it behaves unlike any traffic source before it.
The catch is that these shoppers buy less. They buy the one thing the AI recommended, and nothing else. They are spearfishing. They come for a single item, pointed there by a personal shopper that tells them they do not need much more than that. That erodes basket size, and it erodes brand loyalty on utility purchases, because the relationship the consumer now trusts is with the AI, not the brand.
The strategic response, in Phil's framing, is not to fight the channel. It is to change the relationship. Brands have to move a shopper from a single utility purchase toward something richer. Take them from zero to hero. Educate them so the one thing they came for becomes the start of a relationship, not the end of a transaction. And critically, brands cannot allow marketplaces to fully mediate that relationship. Whoever owns the direct connection with the consumer owns the future value.
There is a second, quieter shift underneath this one. Budgets are moving out of headcount and into technology. A new operating model is emerging: embed an AI engineer inside a team, let that team work with them as an internal consultant for five to seven months, then rotate them to the next group. The first team becomes self-sufficient. You end up needing only one or two true system-builders, because the capability has been distributed across the organization.
That is the demand-side picture. The consumer is being rewired, and so is the org chart behind the brand.
Why IM Digital Is at the Forefront
The platform is ready. As Deja Amato explained, tools like Klaviyo exist to help operators capture customer data and turn it into experiences that keep them competitive, and the industry is only at the very beginning of using them.
The adoption path is clear. Justin's strangler fig approach means growing the new alongside the old, protecting the irreplaceable asset (your people and your expertise), and backward-planning every technology decision from what the customer actually needs.
The consumer is changing. As Phil Jackson noted, AI-referred shoppers convert harder but buy narrower, brand loyalty is eroding on utility purchases, and the winners will be the brands that own the direct relationship instead of surrendering it to marketplaces.
Over 3,000 organizations, more than 10,000 attendees, and $60 billion in economic impact, all in one place, facing a technology shift that rewards whoever moves first with discipline. That is why we were at Cultivate, and that is the intersection IM Digital works at every day: pairing deep customer-data and AI strategy with the human expertise that makes it matter. We are here to help the green industry keep the best of what it has built and grow the next generation of it, one percent at a time.
