The Compounding Year

This is our fifth annual letter. As in past years, we use it to review the year, share what we expect next, and publicly process what we’re learning. This year, much of that learning has come from AI.

We’ve spent several years building a company that can serve this industry well. This year, more of that investment is becoming visible, and AI is changing what we think is possible.

In our 2023 letter, we wrote that “I will work harder” had stopped working. There are only so many hours in a day, and effort alone kept us behind. AI has raised that limit. We’ve run hundreds of experiments with AI and rebuilt how Silver Fern works from the ground up. That has opened up work that used to be completely out of the question, from machine learning for demand planning to fernie™ inside Work Suite™.

The range and scale of what we can accomplish have changed fundamentally.

After two years of going deep on AI, we think of it as a kind of knowledge energy, like electricity or gas. Much of our investment has gone into the piping: the infrastructure and ways of working needed to harness it. Our experience reflects Sam Altman’s recent comments about how slowly society and the economy adapt to AI. The gap between AI capability and AI adoption has never been bigger. AI can already do far more than most people and businesses use it for, so the hard part now is adoption: helping people and organizations adapt their systems, processes, and skills to put it to work. Helping growers close that gap is becoming an increasingly important part of our work.

Here are some ways it’s showing up:

• Machine learning for demand planning. In RESTOCK™ and FORECAST™, we’re applying AI-powered machine learning to sales patterns, weather, and economic conditions to help growers anticipate what each store will need and make better replenishment decisions. The goal is less unsold inventory and fewer missed sales. In July, the Bluegrass AgTech Development Corporation awarded us a $100,000 Challenge Grant to support that work.
• fernie™ and expanded capabilities. Inside Work Suite™, fernie™ can create reports that growers can schedule, create orders, and help them navigate the application. We’re also working on route optimization, deep analytics, and a much wider range of integrations with accounting, customer management, and commerce systems.
• Industry research. Growers Buying Growers is our research into consolidation in horticulture. A year earlier, it would have taken a month or more, even using AI, and might not have been practical at all. We completed it in about a week, with roughly five hours of dedicated attention. Those hours went into reviewing the data, choosing what to explore, and shaping the writing.
• Our website and financial model. We rebuilt silverfern.com and built a financial forecasting model for our own business. Both would have been out of the question a year ago. The website follows through on last year’s commitment to clarify our brand: Work Suite™ is the AI-native ERP platform with solutions across our industry. It also gives us a home for substantive industry research like Growers Buying Growers.

As our capacity to build has grown, we’ve also strengthened the way we deliver improvements to growers. Our team’s persistence has made weekly releases consistent and dependable, giving growers a steady flow of improvements. We have our eyes set on daily automated releases. That takes far more infrastructure and testing than people outside the process might realize, but we already have many of the building blocks in place.

For growers, that progress starts with an easier move onto the platform. Migration once meant hours of painstaking work in spreadsheets. Our internal tools now handle most of that work automatically, lifting a substantial burden from growers’ teams. We expect a migration agent to make those capabilities available directly to growers soon. Training will remain a human part of that experience. Learning a new system means changing familiar habits and routines, and people need someone who understands their operation to help them through it.

Automating more of the routine work across Silver Fern has allowed us to spend substantially more time with growers: understanding their businesses, working through questions together, and helping them put new capabilities to use.

That is what Thursdays represents. John and Stephen have opened their calendars for demos, training, and working sessions on the challenges growers face in their businesses. Since its launch in July, they have held around 100 meetings with growers across Thursdays and their other work, including on-site visits. Those conversations are also shaping what we build. Feedback from grower meetings now flows automatically into our development process, so what we learn is incorporated into Work Suite™.

We’re pairing that personal attention with automatically updated documentation, weekly release notes, and online demos. In our last letter, we committed to reimagining Client Success and strengthening our feedback loops. These changes are how we’re following through: making information easier to find, making experienced people more available to help, and making grower conversations a regular part of how the product develops.

Cultivate was another highlight this year. We especially enjoyed showing people the massive touchscreen, complete with fireworks, for America’s 250th! We’ve also continued talking with others across the industry about collaboration, following through on a commitment from our last letter. As AI has transformed what we can accomplish inside Silver Fern, we’ve become more ambitious about what we can build together for growers.

We see a future in which far more of a grower’s business is connected and automated, from operational and financial information to weather and market data, so growers can see their businesses more clearly, make better decisions, and spend less time moving data between systems. We’re building Silver Fern to bring that whole business together and expand what growers can accomplish.

If you’d like to see what we’re working on, book a demo or visit us at our offices in Lexington, Kentucky. We’d love to spend some time with you and show you around.

To our clients, thank you for your trust, for sharing your challenges and ideas, and for helping shape what we build. And to everyone at Silver Fern, thank you for the imagination and persistence behind this year’s progress.

The future for growers is extremely bright.

Sincerely,

Adam, Kevin, Stephen, & John