Johari Rahim, Chief Marketing Officer, Social Dispensary – Interview Series

As the U.S. cannabis industry moves further into the second half of the 2020s, questions—and concerns—are mounting around the use of advanced technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and machine learning systems. While AI offers clear benefits for inventory and retail management, its application across other roles and departments raises significant caution. In an industry with so many distinct yet interconnected operations, there is an equal measure of optimism and skepticism.

To get a closer look at AI and machine learning systems and their potential across the many facets of the cannabis industry, mycannabis.com spoke with Johari Rahim, Chief Marketing Officer at Social Dispensary.

When it comes to the mostly uncharted world of cannabis marketing, what were the most useful courses that you took while obtaining your BFA from Bradley University? How did those lessons pay off throughout your time in the cannabis industry?

Getting an art degree really set the stage and standard for how I see people connect with brands and visuals, but the psychology behind how the mind works and shapes people’s behavior was the main takeaway from my education.  In school, marketing was defined as the confluence where art and science come together as a discipline to drive behavior that meets the organization’s goals and understanding that marketing was creative business problem solving has been my north star since the beginning.

How is the field of marketing for luxury resorts and travel different from marketing for more affordable travel destinations? How does the luxury association change the marketing strategies themselves?

Luxury travel clubs like Inspirato and Exclusive Resorts have a huge barrier to entry…a paid membership that costs $15K or more and only gets you access to travel; you still have to pay the $1K/night rates to stay at the properties. That’s an enormous challenge to sell on, so the marketing approach had to work both emotionally and rationally to appeal to the audience. We also needed to walk the customer through a carefully curated consideration journey of how this would fit into and enhance their lives as a continuous feature instead of a one-time escape to a place.

After serving in some very prestigious marketing roles outside of the cannabis industry, what drew your professional attention to working in cannabis? What possibilities did you envision in the cannabis industry that may not have been possible in other industries?

My landing in cannabis was passion-driven. Once recreational legalization hit Colorado, it was something everyone around me told me I needed to be doing based on my love for the plant.  I knew that there were a lot of restrictions in cannabis marketing, but I was totally shocked once I learned about what the limitations are and how little access we had to the contemporary set of tools and tactics. Coming from the travel industry, I was used to Salesforce (CRM ) as the CRM and running paid campaigns on Google and Meta and when I entered cannabis, it truly felt like stepping 20 years into the past. 

How did your role with Star Buds prove to be helpful throughout the process of founding Social Dispensary? How did already having industry experience assist you and your co-founders during the application and licensing process?

The Star Buds experience was a master class in how to succeed in cannabis and how to be a lean, agile and creative operator while having fewer resources and more compliance. Of course, this was a stark contrast to my experience in the travel industry and it forced a discipline of efficiency and a focus on the bottom line. From my perspective, this is why Social Dispensary has been so successful. Our co-founding team all had the same background coming from Star Buds and the same operating philosophy and ethos, which made it natural for us to start our own company. 

How have your marketing duties with Social Dispensary changed since the company was first founded? What would you say caused those major changes and how did you roll with them?

In the beginning, when it was just the founding team, I executed the full marketing stack myself. I built the brand, website and created all the collateral and signage and everything in between as a side project.  As we grew and opened new Social Dispensary stores and expanded the scope of our marketing reach, we added external vendors and agencies to the mix to sharpen our strategy. Then, as AI became a critically useful addition to the tool set, we added internal resources and brought most of it back in-house. What hasn’t changed is our focus on the customer and making their experience with us as memorable as possible.

From a marketing standpoint, what all goes into expanding into a total of nine dispensaries across Colorado? How do you ensure that marketing strategies are ultimately successful for all Social Dispensary stores regardless of where they’re located?

The role and impact of marketing changes as the footprint expands.  With two to three stores, the tactics are hyper-local and targeted at only the areas around the retail locations.  When you get to five-plus in a metro area, you have the advantage of scale and awareness, particularly along commuter corridors that widen the target area, allowing to open the tactics higher up on the funnel with a wider reach.  At that point, your brand awareness and differentiators become a bigger focus. One constant that should always be a focus is customer retention and loyalty. Keeping customers coming back is a requirement to continue to grow.

What are some helpful ways that you’ve utilized AI/machine learning technology in the operations of Social Cannabis? How have those systems helped in ways that other technologies couldn’t?

We first leveraged AI to automate repetitive work.  A lot of reporting and inventory management tasks repeat endlessly, so automating those functions and taking that pressure off of store operations allows our teams to focus on the customer experience.  From there, we leveraged AI in marketing to really level up our digital marketing. We were able to generate a tremendous amount of content that helped us rely less on agencies and outside resources and develop internal disciplines around SEO and loyalty communications.  

What are some further ways that AI/machine learning systems can become more compatible with cannabis business operations and regulation as well? What would be required for those systems to evolve?

The biggest advantage with AI in cannabis is connecting and leveraging data. Cannabis dispensaries have the richest data set in all of retail—100% of PII (Personally Identifiable Information) for 100% of people coming in the door, with 90% purchase intent. The possibilities are endless across all facets of the business.  Once we had the data foundation built, we developed internal tools to surface the critical key performance indicators for our team leaders so they can coach staff and operate the stores in real time. That has allowed us to excel at the counter and with the customer and measure the impact it makes. We’ve unified the data between our POS and CRM, which has enabled us to craft personalized customer journeys across multiple channels and touchpoints.

Where AI is today, the limits aren’t in the systems or the data; it’s the operators and their vision for how to deploy it.  With tools like ChatGPT and Claude, almost anything can be built to achieve your goal, but the secret to getting results lies in the vision you have for it and what problems you’re trying to solve.

How would you address the concerns that some industry professionals and experts have about AI usage in the cannabis industry? Also, how is Social Dispensary ensuring that their use of AI doesn’t cause future concerns?

I think a lot of the concerns about AI in general are grounded in a fear of change.  In this case, it’s a lot of change happening at such a rapid pace and feeling like it’s difficult to keep up with it, let alone learn it, build on it and realize its potential. Any good operator in cannabis is adaptive to change,  so I encourage all of us in the industry to lean into its potential.  We’re seeing a lot of positive movement in the cannatech space with the way AI has helped those companies scale development and release new features faster.  Now POS companies like Flowhub have a native MCP (Model Context Protocol) connection that opens the door further to more innovation using AI tools. We’re early in a technological revolution that, like all the others that have come before, favors the early adopters and those who can put it into practice.For us, AI infrastructure has become a critical part of our organization and how we operate, so we’re continuously strengthening the foundation and dreaming of how we can use it to advance all the facets of our business. We’re actively hiring for an AI Engineer position to make it a dedicated and ongoing discipline in our organization.  I expect to see that becoming commonplace in many organizations, similar to having an IT resource on staff.

What do you predict that the upcoming years will hold for the Colorado cannabis industry? Similarly, how do you think AI/machine learning systems will evolve as the cannabis industry itself evolves?

We’ll continue to see the consolidation and price compression that’s currently happening, but my hope is the race to the bottom will ease up and we’ll see better market stability with a more balanced supply that will be healthier for everyone. While we’re the most mature market in the country, we’re still very early in the arc of this industry, so there’s still lots of opportunity and potential for those that focus on operational excellence, margin protection and keeping the ship pointed towards the customer.Similarly, AI is also in its infancy and on a fast track to become a ubiquitous technology like electricity or the internet. Right now we’re at an inflection point with it where its use in business is starting to really take hold across all industries, cannabis included. Tech platforms are embedding AI in the systems we use today. My prediction is that we’ll see more and more software platforms embed LLM (Large Language Model)-style chatbots, as well as using it to develop the systems themselves. But the true opportunity to harness the potential of AI and machine learning lies in the creativity of those with the vision for how it can impact their business.       

Thank you for joining us, Johari! For more information on Social Dispensary, please visit its website.