Check back later on lawnandlandscape.com for more coverage from the 2023 Lawn & Landscape Technology Conference, including more details from Kevin's keynote address.
Kevin Surace started his keynote speech Wednesday with some bad news – the labor shortage isn’t going anywhere.
Surace told attendees at the Lawn & Landscape Technology Conference that statistically, the birth rate nationwide has trended downward for 40 years while the need for employees has gone up. The previous strategy on doubling productivity at work was to double your employment.
Surace, the chairman and chief technology officer at Appvance AI, says that’s a reality of the past.
“Each one of you thinks you have the trick to buck the macro trend. It’s a macro trend – you can’t win. It’s an unwinnable trend,” Surace says. “We can’t double the people. There aren’t double the people. If there aren’t double the people, that means you must embrace the technology.”
Not all’s lost though, Surace says. Increasing artificial intelligence capabilities have proven to be overwhelming at times, but still quite useful. Surace showed attendees videos that were entirely AI-generated. They heard voices and music that were never produced by human beings. And he even used AI to tell landscaping-specific jokes on stage, including a quip about lawn mowers.
But how is AI applicable to landscapers? Among other ways, he suggests applying it in the following areas:
- Content generation and content editing: Use AI to create blog posts for your website to bring extra views, helping your search engine optimization and presence online.
- Landscape design: Help clients envision their dream backyards by taking a picture of their landscapes, then apply filters on AI-powered apps that would show edited photos of their properties with certain landscape types (Colonial garden versus New England garden, for instance).
- Robotic field work: Allowing autonomous mowers to run the maintenance side of your business, empowering employees to do more work.
Surace says AI is often viewed as the boogeyman – or, more specifically, a job thief. But Surace says AI is just leading to less tasks, not less jobs. In fact, in the past, AI has proven to actually lead to more jobs. Calculators did not shut out accountants; it empowered them. And today, as AI is conquering language after conquering mathematics, he says we’re seeing AI do anything like more accurately diagnose heart arrythmias than leading cardiologists, or scan through NDAs in 30 seconds when lawyers need 90 minutes.
“Your future growth,” Surace says, “will come from your leverage of technology.”
