Can AI Help You Find a Better Local Business?

There's certainly no shortage of controversy surrounding AI, and I'm not going to try to tackle all of that here nor should this write up be taken as an endorsement about AI either way. In fact that controversy is exactly why I chose this topic, and the question posed is one that as a florist and small business owner I have to consider. Obviously I'm not an expert on artificial intelligence, and here are plenty of people far more qualified to have those conversations. What I do want to talk about is one change that could potentially be very good for consumers, and small businesses like ours: AI may make it considerably easier to find out who you're actually buying from and potentially level the playing field between giant corporations and small businesses.

This is a problem we've been facing in the floral industry for years. Let's say you live in Calgary and your mom lives here in Brandon. Her birthday is tomorrow, you forgot (don't worry, we won't tell her), and you decide to send flowers. You pull out your phone and search "flower delivery Brandon Manitoba." Up pops a list of businesses, ads, maps and websites, and unless you're familiar with Brandon, you really don't have any way of knowing who is actually here.

That's important, because some of the companies advertising flower delivery in Brandon aren't Brandon flower shops at all. Some are what our industry refers to as order gatherers. They take your order and then figure out how to get something to the recipient, whether that's passing the order along to another florist or fulfilling it through some other means. The website may be advertising flowers in Brandon, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's a flower shop behind that website anywhere near Brandon.

We've been combatting this for years, and order gatherers (Bloomex in particular) have been a frustration for us. They have an advertising budget that a little independent flower shop like ours simply can't realistically compete with, nor are we particularly interested in trying. What we have tried to do is educate people; check independent reviews, look for a real local address, find out who you're actually ordering from, read the delivery policies. If a company is advertising "same-day delivery," what does that actually mean? Is there a cutoff? Is it guaranteed? Who is making the flowers? Who is delivering them? And what happens if something goes wrong?

None of that information has exactly been hidden from consumers. The problem is that finding it takes time. Most people aren't interested in spending half an hour researching flower shops because Mom's birthday is tomorrow and, remember, you already forgot about it once. You're probably going to look at the first few results, find something you like at a price you're comfortable with and place the order. That's perfectly understandable. As consumers, we all do some version of this.

With AI, you can ask a much more specific question right from the start. Instead of typing "flower delivery Brandon Manitoba" and working your way through whatever comes up, you could ask, "I need to send flowers to my mom in Brandon, Manitoba tomorrow. Find me a florist that is actually located in Brandon, has good reviews, makes its own arrangements and can deliver them."

In about the same amount of time, you've asked AI to do some of the research you probably weren't going to do yourself. Instead of simply looking for businesses that match a few search terms, it can look at information about those businesses as part of answering the question. You can also keep going: "Does this company actually have a shop in Brandon?" "What do their reviews say?" "Do they really offer same-day delivery?" "Are there recurring complaints about customer service or orders arriving late?"

Of course, AI can get things wrong. Information can be outdated, something can be misunderstood, and I certainly wouldn't suggest blindly believing everything an AI tells you any more than I'd suggest blindly believing the first website that appears in a search. Check the sources it gives you, visit the company's website and make your own decision. The difference is that some of the legwork that used to require opening a dozen tabs can now potentially happen as part of the original search.

That's a potentially pretty big change for small businesses like ours. We can't compete with the amount of money some national companies can spend making sure you see their name. What we can compete on is what happens when you start asking questions about reputation, customer service, local knowledge and what actually happens after you place the order.

We've owned The BloomBox since 2008. We're physically here in Brandon. The designs on our website are designs we've actually made in our shop. We make our own arrangements, we make most of our own deliveries, we publish our delivery and substitution policies, and if you call us, you're talking to the people who are actually going to handle your order. We've spent years building a reputation one customer and one order at a time. The problem is that none of those things necessarily put our name above a company willing to spend considerably more than us on advertising.

Until fairly recently, if we wanted a potential customer to know the difference, we had to hope they would take the time to investigate it themselves. We've written articles about order gatherers, talked about the issue on social media and explained it to customers when the subject comes up. We can keep doing that, but we're one little flower shop in Brandon. Compared with national advertising budgets, our ability to educate the entire flower-buying public is pretty much a drop in the ocean.

AI may give the consumer a much bigger picture. This isn't really about order gatherers, or even flowers. The same problem exists in all kinds of industries.

Maybe you're travelling and your vehicle breaks down in a city you've never visited. You need a mechanic and have absolutely no idea who to call. Maybe you're sending a birthday cake to someone across the country, hiring a plumber, looking for a photographer, finding a contractor or booking a restaurant somewhere you've never been.

Traditionally, you'd search for whatever you need and start working through the results. The businesses with the strongest online presence or biggest advertising budgets have a pretty obvious advantage because they're the businesses you're most likely to see first. Now you can add the questions that actually matter to you;

"Find me an independent mechanic nearby with good reviews that can look at my vehicle today."

"Find me a bakery in this city that actually makes its cakes in-house and can deliver one tomorrow."

"Which of these contractors has been operating locally for more than ten years, and are there recurring complaints I should know about?"

That's quite different from simply asking where the nearest business is. It also means a small business doesn't necessarily have to beat a national company at its own game. We don't need to have the biggest advertising budget if the customer starts asking questions that advertising dollars can't answer particularly well.

Are you actually local? Do you have a good reputation? Do customers seem happy with the service they receive? Do you do what you say you're going to do? Are your policies clear? Can I contact a real person if there's a problem?

Those are things a small business can compete on.

There is another side to this for businesses too. AI needs something to work with. If your website hasn't been updated in five years, your policies aren't posted, your business information is inconsistent and there's very little online information about what you actually do, AI can't magically know the answers. In some ways, that makes being open about how you operate even more important than it was before.

We've been doing a lot of that without really thinking about AI. We've written articles explaining how we source flowers, how our deliveries work, where we deliver, what custom design means, why arrangements don't always look exactly like their photographs and even what happens to flowers before we ever design with them. We wrote those things because customers ask those questions and we think it's useful information.

It turns out that all of that information may now serve another purpose. If someone asks an AI a detailed question about us, there's actually information available for it to find.

I don't think traditional search engines are going anywhere, and I don't think AI is suddenly going to make advertising irrelevant. There will also undoubtedly be companies that figure out how to game AI results just as companies learned how to game search results. That's the nature of the internet, and I'm sure that particular game of cat and mouse will continue.

But from where I'm sitting, there is one change that I think could be genuinely useful.

For years, a consumer searching "flower delivery Brandon" was largely asking the internet, "Who sells flowers in Brandon?"

Now they can just as easily ask, "Who sells flowers in Brandon, who is actually located there, and what do their customers say about them?"

That's a much better question.

Maybe the little guy still doesn't have the advertising budget to make sure we're the first name you see. But if technology makes it easier for you to look past the advertisement and learn something about the company behind it, we're quite happy to let our reputation, our work and our customers speak for us.

We can compete on reputation all day long, and welcome it.

Fresh. Unique. Flowers. It's What We Do!