This information came from a session during the 2025 ELEVATE conference and expo. Don’t miss ELEVATE in Tampa, Florida, on Nov. 8-11, 2026.
AI has become ubiquitous and almost every form of software now offers some type of internal AI integration. Yet if you’re one of the landscape companies that have been wary about whether this technology can really help you and provide savings for your organization, you’re not alone.
According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index Report, currently only 41% of business leaders expect to redesign business processes from the ground up with AI in mind over the next five years.
Yet 78% of AI users already bring their own AI tools to work, and this is even more common in small- to medium-sized companies. Of these individuals, 53% fear that using AI for important tasks will make them look replaceable.
However, when landscape leaders fail to implement strategic AI use at scale, it puts company data at risk. Rather than having employees hide their AI usage, work to educate everyone on staff on how to effectively and safely utilize this technology.
Carolyn Humpherys, learning and change management consultant with Alterity Solutions & Traveling Coaches, shares some of the fundamentals of generative AI as well as how to practically calculate the ROI of AI.
Elements of an Effective Prompt
Unlike search engines, AI needs more direct prompts compared to a search query you’d use in Google to find the answers you need. Humpherys says effective prompts should have a goal, context, source and expectations.
Consider what you want the AI platform to do, why you need it and who is involved, what data you need it to use and how you want it to respond.
One framework you can utilize to craft effective prompts is following RISEN:
- R – Role – Give AI a role to play, such as “Act like a property manager.”
- I – Instructions – Be specific in what you tell the AI to do. For instance, “Identify property improvements and their potential impact on customer satisfaction.”
- S – Steps – Talk to AI like a human and keep it simple by telling it what order to do things in, like “Analyze current customer feedback, then identify areas for improvement.”
- E – End Goal – Tell AI your desired outcome and format. This could be in a table, bullet points or a tiered list.
- N – Narrowing – Provide constraints so the AI doesn’t give you a broad, generic answer. Ex. “Focus on urgent changes, not planned upgrades.”
A prompt that utilizes this framework would look something like this:
Act like a small to medium enterprise and a property manager.
• Develop a customer retention strategy for XYZ property.
• Follow these steps:
1) Analyze current customer feedback;
2) Identify key areas for improvement;
3) Propose actionable steps to enhance customer satisfaction.
• Present the strategy in a report format.
• Include at least three specific initiatives.
If an AI platform doesn’t give you the response you’re looking for or it takes some fine-tuning, such as asking it to be more concise or revise its response to include additional information, you can save yourself additional time in the future by asking it to “Write a prompt that gets me to this point in one prompt.”
Another way to refine the responses you receive is to apply personas or practice scenarios such as “my audience is X” or “Let’s role-play a tough conversation. You be the manager, and I’ll be the employee.”
Humpherys also recommends asking AI to ask follow-up questions to clarify the request before providing a solution.
Guardrails Against Hallucinations
Because AI wants to please you, when it doesn’t know the answer, it will simply make things up. This is known as hallucinations and can be caused by outdated information, non-authoritative sources, not understanding the context or being confused.
Some of the ways to protect your company from blindly trusting every AI-generated response include fact-checking and reasoning.
A prompt such as “Please give me the full context of this fact, directly quoted in context so I can fact-check it: [fact]” is a quick way for you to be able to double-check something you’re not certain about. Asking AI to explain its reasoning in detail or verify its reasoning can also help you spot when it may have provided an incorrect response.
When using AI, Humpherys says you should review, edit and repeat. After checking for accuracy, make sure the information is on-brand. Add depth with your voice and data. She warns against the “AI accent” in writing and uncanniness in AI-generated images.
Use Cases for Generative AI
Generative AI has numerous uses, including summarization, classification, translation, research, analysis, extraction and organization. It can also help with proposal writing, crafting social media marketing posts, and developing a training and onboarding plan.
Below are some additional example prompts you can use.
Strategic planning
“Act like a landscape operations director. Analyze the cost-benefit of upgrading to smart irrigation systems across 10 commercial properties. Include estimated water savings, ROI over 3 years, and a summary table for executive review.”
Crew scheduling
“Act like a landscape operations manager. Given 8 job sites with addresses and service durations, create an optimized daily route for 3 crews. Minimize drive time and balance workload. Output as a table with crew assignments and estimated arrival times.”
Customer feedback analysis
“Classify the following customer comments as positive, negative, or neutral. Group them by issue (e.g., mowing, irrigation, communication). Provide a summary of top concerns and suggested improvements.”
Ensuring Adoption
One thing that may be holding your company back from fully integrating AI is not understanding the ROI it can provide. One formula that can help with this is to subtract the amount of time it takes to do something without AI versus with it. Then multiply that total by the number of times the task is done in a month. If you multiply that number by your hourly/billable rate, you will have your monthly benefit.
So, if it takes you 4 hours to do a task without AI, but with AI it takes 15 minutes, that equals 3.75 hours. If you typically do this task twice a month, multiply 2 by 3.75 to get 7.5 hours. Say your hourly rate is $50, 7.5 hours times $50 equals $375, which is your ROI.
Humpherys says you should also measure your key metrics and consider intangible benefits to determine the value AI brings to your organization.
“You just need to use AI enough to get a feel for what you can use it for in your area of expertise,” says Ethan Mollick with oneusefulthing.org. “The most important thing to do is to get 10 or so hours of use with an advanced AI system. And to do that you just need to be a good-enough prompter to overcome the barriers that hold many AI users back.”
If you want your entire team tapping into AI to tackle their tasks more efficiently, you need to explain why they should use AI, how it positively impacts them, how to use AI and remind them on a regular basis until it becomes adopted.
It’s also important to pick the right tool for the job. While some platforms like ChatGPT are generalist tools, other AI platforms are better suited for specific tasks. For instance, Perplexity is best for complex math explanations and technical comparisons.
Humpherys encourages moving away from the expectation of a perfect first draft. AI is a content accelerator that allows you to fine-tune the end result from there.
What matters the most is simply starting. Choose one thing to master each day, week or month to gain experience and confidence and see which specific applications offer the most ROI for different roles within your organization.
For more content like this, be sure to register for next year’s ELEVATE in Tampa, Florida, on Nov. 8-11.
