ALJ Hearing Shows Medical Use + AI Enters Cannabis Industry
Shadd Dales and Anthony Varrell opened Wednesday’s Trade to Black, presented by Flowhub, with a brief check-in on Day Three of the ALJ hearing — a quieter session ahead of prohibitionist testimony expected to begin Thursday — before noting a milestone in Georgia, where smokable medical cannabis products became available for the first time. The hosts highlighted that the first purchase was made by a veteran, using the moment to underscore the ongoing importance of expanding plant medicine access for those who have served.
In the first segment, Kyle Sherman, Founder and CEO of Flowhub, joined to discuss how artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape cannabis retail operations — and where most operators still fall short of its real potential. Sherman observed that while AI adoption is accelerating across the industry, the majority of users remain stuck in basic generative tasks rather than tapping into the emerging agentic era, where tools connect to one another, automate workflows, and take action on behalf of the user.
To address that gap, Flowhub launched an open MCP — Model Context Protocol — server, making it the first cannabis retail platform to allow operators to connect their data directly to AI language models of their choice, including those from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Rather than building a proprietary chatbot, Flowhub made its system accessible to whichever frontier model an operator prefers, enabling agents to autonomously query inventory data, identify trends, configure deals, adjust pricing across multiple locations, and generate scheduled reports — all through natural language.
The second segment continued the show’s weekly Vantage Standard series presented by Vantage, with Dr. Paul Shields, Chief Medical Officer of Vantage, offering his perspective on the medical-use discussions emerging from the ALJ hearing. Shields described the FDA’s public acknowledgment of cannabis’s medical benefits under oath as a landmark moment — not a shift in scientific opinion, which he suggested clinicians have quietly held for some time, but a pivotal public affirmation.
Hear it all when you tune in.
