These days, AI seems to be everywhere. New varieties of innovations and integrations help with scraping data, automating repetitive tasks, and generating recipe ideas. Now, new technologies are being implemented to improve consumers’ experiences with cannabis.

Having had a negative first experience with cannabis, Noel Burkman still believes in the plethora of wellness benefits the herb can provide. As a technology developer in the ecommerce space, he came across a new AI platform being designed to help promote improved user experiences, and he knew he had to be a part of it. Along with Steve Horwitz, Burkman purchased StrainBrain – an AI interface that helps cannabis dispensaries increase cart size and revenue by providing personalized recommendations for website visitors. 

Burkman and his all-star leadership team have already announced new improvements and updates after taking over the business four months ago. A press release shared last week outlines some of the new capabilities: “It doesn't just describe products — it understands what people are actually looking for.”

Burkman sat with The Green Letter to share details about the recent acquisition, some insights to the platform’s abilities, and how AI can help elevate and advance the cannabis industry altogether. This interview has been edited for length and clarity, and the press release is attached below.

Q&A

How did you come to work with StrainBrain?

Me and my co-founder – Steve Horwitz – had been looking at the cannabis sector for about two years. I was doing work for Hoodie Analytics, and that’s what brought me into the cannabis world. I’m a technology guy – I’ve been doing ecommerce for the last 25 years – and was looking for my next adventure. We looked at a bunch of companies — looking at the technology, looking at the opportunity, looking at a bunch of different characteristics. When we came across StrainBrain, it was a very compelling opportunity because the two men working on it were super bright. 

They were working on bone marrow cancer AI diagnostics, but they saw this opportunity and repurposed some of their tech towards strain discovery and classification and using that to develop the strain recommendation engine. They were just knocking it out of the park with their tech; they were already deployed in over 100 dispensaries knowing nothing about marketing or business. It was all inbound, so it was a unique opportunity as they wanted to go back to solving bone marrow cancer diagnostic AI issues.

We’ve since put together an amazing team — I was introduced to Dina Rollman; she comes from the founding team at GTI [Green Thumb Industries] and was also looking for her next adventure. We met Ed Brill who came from a long stint at IBM and in charge of one of their product lines — great product guy. Steve Horwitz – his firm Orchid Black is a group of really experienced operators we can bring in as needed. And we have Mitch Khan – he was the founder of Grassroots [Cannabis] – who has come in as an investor and advisor. Between Mitch and Dina, their access and knowledge of the industry is almost unparalleled. We’ve just been able to have really good conversations with the right people at the right companies rather quickly. It’s still a growth company so nothing’s a guarantee or a slam dunk, but we certainly set ourselves up in the best possible position for success.

What was the creation process like before the company was passed to your current team?

The creators started about four years ago. They've gone through a number of iterations of the interface, and they’re very data-driven. It was like ‘let’s get this down to the fewest number of questions that gets a customer to the highest quality recommendation. Everybody’s familiar with ChatGPT or other large language models, but they developed what is called a small language model. I use ChatGPT every day. It’s great, but it introduces a lot of hallucinations or misinformation because it’s so broad. The beauty and nuance of this small language model is this is designed specifically for this use case to help customers find cannabis products. They built their own data set as well, so it’s trained on their own data. This data set has been growing and growing, but this is really the only effects cannabis data set in the industry, so those two things come together to make a really powerful recommendation.

It was in market, we saw the experience was tested and proven, and we brought on some data scientists to look at it and understand how extensible it was and how much more we can do with it. It was highly extensible, and Andrew – one of the [original] founders – is still working with us and guiding us along as we go.

How often are you coming up with new technologies or expansions to this platform?

We’ve had control of the asset for about four months, so this first release is a fairly big deal. We’ve done a lot of work in four months, and our road map has us going at the same clip to release new features and functionality — we have different experiences that we want to bring out. StrainMe is the first of what we’re calling “expert mode experience.” 

The standard StrainBrain is geared towards those who don’t understand cannabis. I wrote an article on LinkedIn about bringing my mom to a dispensary and letting her go, and her coming back to the car saying, “some kid told me to buy … this was going to give me couch lock – I think it’s called cheetah piss.” Fifty-five-and-older is the largest converting segment right now in cannabis, so really bridging that conversation and talking to different cohorts of people in different ways is really critical to our mission.

I met with a dispensary in Chicago yesterday, and to be honest with you, the budtenders were a little apprehensive. I said, “Do you believe that you are reaching everybody within, let’s say, 10 blocks of here that are willing to buy cannabis?” That made them pause. I said, “Well, I guarantee you there’s some 55-year-old people out there, some 45-years-old, and maybe some who are 21 or 22 and aging in who go to your website and don’t know how to navigate it, then that’s about it for them. In that sense, you’re not bringing everybody in the door that you could be, probably by orders of magnitude. This is our first lifeline out there to say let’s bring new cohorts into this dispensary.”

Are these levels chosen by the dispensary or the user?

There are different stages, so the first part of that is our interface allows you to choose your own adventure. You can go through the standard questions like ‘How do I want to feel’ or ‘How do I want to consume,’ and under that is for those interested in looking for a certain strain. They want to see if the dispensary has that strain, and if not, they want to see what products are closest to that strain.

The next iteration … it’s actually available now, and we’re going to be implementing it as an embedded, standalone version of each one of those. Dispensaries can market those as separate experiences to different cohorts of people, and we’re going to continue to segment from there. We’re really data-driven, so we really want to understand as we go along how customers interact with it. 

We’re not trying to push budtenders out; this gets them into the store. We want people to come into the store and hold up their phone and say ‘this has been recommended to me, tell me a little more about it.’ We’re not trying to displace them; we’re just trying to get more people informed, educated, and in the store buying product. Most people’s first experience with cannabis tends to be a bit more unpleasant than not, and that’s avoidable.

How do dispensaries start using StrainBrain?

Easy implementation is the beauty of this solution. If you’re on one of the standard tech stacks, it’s literally a 10-minute install. This is a very low lift for most implementations and the impact is immediate — people can start using it right away. 

Will this technology change the way dispensaries operate?

I’ve seen people in this industry and other industries put out solutions and claim there will be specific results and their solution is a silver bullet. This isn’t a silver bullet — I want to be clear about that. We still need our dispensary partners and we still need to drive awareness. When a dispensary gets a customer through our budtender, it increases their shopping cart size significantly. Their challenge is making people more aware. We help them by working with them on marketing, but we want to create more awareness for the dispensaries, the retailers, and highlight the benefits there. It’s an amazing tool, but they also have to do the work to create the awareness around it.

The cannabis shopper experience has been sub-par for a long time, and what this brings to the table are proven results in retail and ecommerce outside of the cannabis industry that we’re applying to help reduce friction and help dispensaries grow. That’s a key aspect.

Are there other areas of cannabis that AI could potentially be beneficial to?

This is not our area, but on the grow side, there’s a lot of AI being used to improve quality. Even stuff like cameras looking at plants and seeing what they think is a weed, then a little arm comes over and plucks the weed. They can analyze if a plant is deficient in this or that, so it’s going to normalize the continuity of crops and the product because it will be able to identify what the differences are in terms of nutrition and other things that affect the grow outcome.

I think AI in general in commerce and ecommerce allows us to change advertising. One of the things that we have in our technology stack is something called Boost. This allows the dispensaries to choose a handful of products to boost without ruining the integrity of the algorithm. It gives the product a bit of a different position in the model, prioritizing it slightly more than other products to help brands and dispensaries optimize their inventory. If they have aging inventory, boosting these products has been a very effective mechanism to help dispensaries maximize their ability to get revenue, meet profit margin, and optimize inventory utilization.

How is AI technology innovation helping drive the whole industry forward?

I don’t see it as just cannabis; that part is not cannabis-specific. AI is a tool to help customers explore, so different customers can explore more products more effectively and complete transactions more quickly. In ecommerce, those things are inevitable. Having been in ecommerce for so long and looking at the kind of historic metrics that people accepted in terms of conversion rates and the hidden secret of digital advertising, the quantification of this impact is voodoo.

People are buying impressions by the ten thousands and the click-through rates on those attributions are really, really difficult. AI allows us to be much more precise in targeting and giving consumers not just ads, but products they really need. I think experiences are going to become much more personalized that there’s always going to be an AI layer. Before there was Windows, everybody interacted with a computer via a command line, then Windows put this graphical interface on top of it. Right now, a lot of people are interacting with AI as a command line, and I think there will be this interactive layer that comes on top and adjusts experiences to personalize to each individual user in real time.

Is cannabis something you’re passionate about personally, and is that what made you want to hop on this project?

There’s a few aspects to that, and I have a lot of answers to that question. My career has been spent working on cannabis, which I’m going to call a legacy industry. One thing I’ve done a lot of work in across multiple industries – higher education, news media, chocolate – is bringing new technology to help advance those industries, and cannabis was throwing off a bunch of signals that they didn’t understand how technology was going to affect their industry. It’s very similar signals with customer sentiment in terms of StrainBrain and others doing some things you couldn’t do before. The market is growing, federal rescheduling is on the table, and the industry is more widely accepted. Opening that up is a passion of mine — bringing new people to new cannabis products. I was one of those people that had a horrible first experience with it — it was miserable. If I can help people to avoid that, I would love to do that. 

I also believe in the wellness aspect of it immensely. I’ve talked to a woman we work with who is an RN and works in oncology to help build cannabis programs for that. After talking with her and other people about the ability to provide relief and different health benefits … I think everybody knows we’re just on the tip of it. It hasn’t been researched enough, but all the indications are profound in terms of its impact on wellness. Sleep – I’m not a good sleeper, and just in that very simple use case, it’s changed the game for me.

StrainBrain Delivers Cannabis Industry AI Breakthrough to Help Dispensaries Increase Revenue, Conversion Rates

Optimized Small Language Model Recognizes Intent and Learns from Industry Interaction

CHICAGO – May 15, 2025 – StrainBrain, the AI Budtender® solution, announced a cannabis industry breakthrough of new proprietary AI models to help dispensaries increase revenue, conversion rates, and customer loyalty by delivering highly accurate, science-based recommendations and enhancing StrainBrain's optimized user journey. 

Four years in development, OWL, or Optimized Weighted Language AI model, recognizes user intent, learns from industry interactions, and can recommend every product that dispensaries offer. Additional new capabilities announced include an expert mode, AI-powered match explanations, and more industry integrations.  

Across the industry, 85% of all cannabis sales start online, and online orders generate 87% more in sales than walk-ins. However, complex online menus can be challenging to navigate, and budtender assistance is limited to the in-store experience.  

StrainBrain’s OWL – a behavioral intelligence layer – transforms shopper curiosity into confident cannabis decisions, increasing conversion, engagement, and lifetime value.

When used as part of a dispensary's e-commerce experience, StrainBrain offers consumers personalized, science-based recommendations that match the desired effect with available inventory – all in just four clicks. Results from dispensaries using StrainBrain include increased conversion rates and cart size. 

"Dispensaries are challenged with thinning margins, a crowded market, and an e-commerce experience filled with friction,” said Dina Rollman, CEO of StrainBrain. “StrainBrain’s AI studies what users want, how they shop, and what works — building a new personalized layer of intelligence. StrainBrain delivers a more confident cannabis e-commerce experience that results in smarter, more loyal customers and increases average cart size.” 

How it works

StrainBrain spent four years developing OWL – its proprietary Small Language Model. The OWL interface quickly and seamlessly integrates with all major cannabis industry platforms, and the model is available 24/7, even when budtenders are unavailable. 

The “boost” component of OWL allows dispensaries to make customized adjustments to the recommendation engine based on specific parameters such as existing levels of inventory and dispensary-specific sales and marketing campaigns.  

Recommendations are delivered to consumers in real-time, based on responses to a few short questions. Those recommendations are then scored to indicate the strength of the match. 

Compared to StainBrain, other recommendation tools rely on surface-level data — lab results, terpene profiles, static effect tags, or generic models like ChatGPT. StrainBrain draws from real-world buying behavior, consumer choice patterns, and dispensary performance data to deliver highly personalized, non-generic recommendations. It doesn't just describe products — it understands what people are actually looking for.

Additional New Capabilities

StrainMe -  An expert mode that allows users who enjoy a particular strain to quickly discover similar strains that are in stock and available immediately.

AI-Powered Match Explanations – Provides shoppers with educational insights on why a particular product was recommended.

Additional Industry Integrations - Expanded support for Dutchie Plus and Jane marketing environments, including RankReallyHigh, Dovetail, and LeafBridge.

About StrainBrain

StrainBrain is an AI-powered technology company revolutionizing the shopping experience through personalized product recommendations. The company’s AI Budtender uses an innovative, science-backed algorithm fueled by real consumer data, enabling cannabis retailers to provide their customers with the most intuitive and accurate product discovery experience. StrainBrain’s AI recommendation engine is the most effective way to amplify online engagement in the last mile of the customer journey. The platform boosts online revenue by consistently driving increased order values, conversion rates, and purchase frequency. 

For additional information, please visit strainbrain.co 

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