BY KATE BERNOT
Despite its ubiquity in other industries, artificial intelligence has yet to make meaningful inroads in the business of craft distilling. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 58 percent of small businesses reported using generative A.I. last year—more than double the 23 percent who reported doing so in 2023. Larger spirits brands, including Four Roses Bourbon, Macallan, and contract spirits company Bespoken Spirits, have been candid about their use of A.I. in production and operations. But for most small distilleries, A.I. remains a distant curiosity or an occasional novelty used to generate goofy Instagram content.
Some of the hesitance could be due to a lack of understanding. A.I. is a broad field; it encompasses any type of technology that enables machines to simulate human cognition, autonomy, and decision-making, from chatbots to image generators. Much of the industry’s reticence is also likely due to the intensity of both sides of the A.I. debate. Its proponents—tech companies that sell A.I. products or evangelists who see it as the future of productivity—often have the zeal of religious fanaticism, ignoring concerns about the technology’s environmental impacts and the threat to human creativity and critical thinking. Its harshest critics, similarly, want nothing to do with A.I. They label it a scourge and warn that, in a worst-case scenario, it destroys humanity itself. Presented with arguments that A.I. will either save the world or doom us to oblivion, it’s no wonder many small business owners simply shrug and move ahead with business as usual.
The truth for craft distilleries is that artificial intelligence might have a role to play in their companies, particularly when it comes to business analysis, sales forecasting, and operations. It’s likely already integrated into some tech products that distilleries use, whether they’re aware of it or not. And—though there’s less consensus on this—some say generative A.I. can benefit the technical and creative work of recipe research, branding and marketing, and even some aspects of digital storytelling. The best way to approach it, experts say, is as a tool—not a decision-maker in itself, but an instrument to be wielded by a human in service of making smarter decisions.
“When I think about the future in this realm, there’s no replacing the creativity of a human,” says Stephanie Grant, the Atlanta-based founder of She Loves Craft, which provides storytelling, branding, and social media strategy to hospitality companies. Grant uses A.I. assistants in her brainstorming and planning processes but cautions against relying on it as a creator, particularly in a field like craft distilling, where consumers are looking for authenticity. “People want something real, and leaning on A.I. as a creator is not going to get you the results you want as a business.”
The Sales and Distribution Case for A.I.
Generative A.I. is what most people think of when they hear the term A.I.; it’s what enables ChatGPT to spit out a poem about sandcastles or create an image of Arnold Schwarzenegger riding a unicorn. But it’s perhaps not the most salient way that A.I. could be part of a craft distillery’s tech ecosystem. A.I. integrations in sales operations can unlock predictive capabilities for both a distillery’s customers and the distillery itself, enabling smarter recommendations for online shoppers and better forecasting for businesses.
Some of this technology is already in use at the wholesale level. Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, America’s largest wine and spirits distributor, uses A.I. analytics dashboards to assist with decisions related to supply chain, warehousing, inventory, and routing. These dashboards combine various sources of data (for example, streams that show shipment timing, warehouse status, sales demand, and more) to help the distributor make better-informed decisions.
Diego Fonseca, vice president of inbound supply chain and logistics at Southern Glazer’s, told Supply Chain Digital that these tools have improved the company’s forecasting BIAS metrics and reduced problems related to under- and overstocking.
“With the use of A.I., we saw improvement … as human sentiment is taken out of the equation. This is helping us tremendously with significant inventory reductions as we place more accurate orders perpetually,” he told the trade publication.
It’s not only the biggest companies that can make use of such technology. Big Thirst and Pour Now, two alcohol retail technology companies, recently launched a joint ecommerce platform with A.I. integrations designed to help smaller spirits brands reach their fans no matter how they want to shop. The Big Thirst + Pour Now platform helps online shoppers see multiple purchasing options—whether it’s a nearby store, the distiller’s own website, or delivery from a retailer. On the back end, custom-coded A.I. aggregates customer data—including how they reached a particular shopping decision—and then enables Big Thirst to suggest personalized marketing campaigns or targeted ads based on actual behavior.
“[Brands] sign up for ecommerce to be able to reach more markets, but the true benefit is understanding the customer trends, the sales trends, the marketing trends, to help you sell better,” says Matt McGinnis, CEO of Big Thirst. “Being able to use A.I. and forecasting to do predictive modeling on future trends, and then understanding your sales and marketing R.O.I., that’s where it’s at.”
Pour Now’s side of the platform—which allows a shopper to see where a particular bottle of rum, vodka, or whiskey is available at retail near them—also integrates A.I. It has helped Pour Now quickly scan tens of thousands of retailer catalogs and meaningfully understand them, even if certain products are slightly misspelled or entered incorrectly. It can also enable more sophisticated recommendations for shoppers, using taste profiles to understand that a customer who likes a particular rhum agricole might also be interested in a similar cachaça. A.I. also helps the platform recognize that wines like Silver Oak Alexander Valley and Silver Oak Napa, while made by the same producer, can have more than a $100 price differential and should not be recommended interchangeably.
The goal, says Pour Now CEO Paul Mabrey, is to create a shopping experience that’s actually satisfying and intuitive. A.I. enables customers to see an omnichannel view and decide which type of retail makes sense for them. Maybe one day, a shopper wants to buy an expensive rum directly from the distillery and is willing to wait a week for shipping. But the next day, they may need to find a good bottle of vodka at a store within 10 miles of their house so they can pick it up quickly for a party.
“It’s giving the power back to the consumer in a fast, efficient way,” Mabrey says. “And then on the backend of it, it’s combining those data sets as a way for us and brands to understand the customer better.”
A Middle Road on Generative A.I.
The way most people envision A.I. is in the form of chatbots and assistants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini. Type a prompt or question into a simple web-based text box, and the bot responds near-instantly. These tools have been criticized on numerous grounds, namely over concerns that they’re a way to outsource creative work, critical thinking, and analysis—skills that are part of what makes us human. They’re known as generative A.I. for their ability to generate content, but because they’re trained only on information that already exists, they’re not truly creative in the way humans are. That means they can also produce incorrect, incomplete, or biased information depending on what data they’ve been trained on. “Garbage in, garbage out” is an old axiom in computer science, but it still holds.
Yet some small distilleries may find value in these tools, depending on the task. That’s the key, says She Loves Craft’s Grant: to remember that these bots are assistants, not producers.
“It can help you brainstorm; it can help you refine what to say. But just asking it to create something like a newsletter … no,” she says. “I can see it doing more of the management parts of a [social media or marketing] job, like pulling analytics reports, and freeing you up to do the creative parts.”
Grant has built a custom A.I. assistant into which she’s fed her own work, helping train it on her voice and priorities. That assistant then helps her ideate, refine content ideas, and interpret social media analytics reports. When she feels stuck on a particular piece of content—like a TikTok video or Instagram post—she can describe an idea to her A.I. assistant, which suggests verbiage or visual options. Grant takes these recommendations with a grain of salt, but finds that the very act of brainstorming can often jog her creativity.
Cal Deline thinks similarly. He’s the founder of Golden, Colorado–based Hoot + Howl Spirits, which launched in 2025. He has used A.I. assistants to help research TTB- and FDA-approved botanical ingredients and to perform administrative tasks like drafting emails. He believes there’s potential for A.I. to act as a sort of in-house marketing or creative firm, but says he’d first want to create a custom assistant trained on Hoot + Howl’s identity and ethos.
Deline used ChatGPT to help refine the distillery’s branding in advance of its opening, feeding it logos, brand stories, and background that might eventually appear in marketing materials. Like Grant, he didn’t use it as an end in itself, but as a creative tool akin to a sounding board.
“You give it your story, and it will spit out 20 possible brands that you can go forward with. And we obviously didn’t end up going with any one of those, but I think that it can help you refine what you’re looking for and you start to figure out what you like and what you don’t like,” he says.
He notes the technology’s limitations, particularly when it comes to originality and staying true to a distillery’s particular voice. Because A.I. is trained on what’s already out there, it presented Deline with ideas that didn’t feel innovative. He’s also noticed that when he prompts it to create, say, a LinkedIn post on a certain topic, it might generate the correct content but in a voice or tone that doesn’t feel true to him.
Similarly, he doesn’t envision ever using A.I. in the creative or technical processes of distillation. Hoot + Howl’s mission is to reimagine historical spirits recipes and processes using modern ingredients and technology—but that doesn’t mean using a machine to evaluate or automate the distilling process itself. (Deline adds that because none of the distillery’s machines are currently digitally enabled, that wouldn’t be a possibility anyway.)
“We do all of our distillation cuts by sensory, by smell and taste. We never make a cut solely based on time, temperature, or proof, even though we use those as guides,” he says. “So I think A.I. ultimately probably can, but in my opinion never should, replace a distiller.”
As Deline has developed recipes, chatbots have proven helpful in combing through vast lists of approved ingredients from the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau and the Food & Drug Administration. Recently, he used ChatGPT to research which plants native to the Rocky Mountain West might be suitable for a new product he describes as a hybrid of chartreuse, génépi, and absinthe. A deep search didn’t yield a perfect answer, but it revealed the original source documents that Deline used to find it.
Deline urges other distilleries not to be intimidated by the technology and instead to experiment with its applications and limitations. As for where to go to learn more about it, well…
“Honestly, I do think if you want to learn more, most of the time, I’d ask A.I. where to start,” he says.