Diaplant

The 2020 website introduced the company as a shop: 553 products, a cart, a wishlist. The mature trees that are the heart of the business accounted for 55 of those entries. Anyone who visited the nursery saw fields of specimen trees shaped by years of pruning. Anyone who visited the website saw a garden centre like any other.

And there was the ambition: to sell directly, under its own brand, to homeowners, to trade buyers and to municipalities, in Portugal and in Spain. Neither the brand nor the digital infrastructure was ready for that.

Four deliverables in four months. A brand platform built from long interviews with the two founders, with the voice taken from their own words, including the return of the historic line “from our field to your garden”. A competitive analysis of the Spanish market, produced by a pipeline of sixteen AI workers that I designed and audited. A strategic playbook of nine initiatives, from the content engine to a presence at the Iberflora trade fair. And the prototype of a multilingual web platform in Django and Wagtail that nobody had asked for: I built it because a client who cannot judge promises can judge a prototype. That prototype is in production today.

Production was delegated as far as possible to specialised AI workers: some only observe and catalogue, others analyse, others write. My own time went to what the machine does badly: judgement, editorial control and the relationship with the client.

Discipline matters more than tools, and one episode from the project shows why. A worker classified Cláudio, one of the partners, as a biologist. His training is in plant genetics. It then recommended building the branding on that invented credential. The error was caught because the system was designed to be auditable, with the founder interview transcripts as the final authority over any external source. Without that discipline, a hallucination becomes strategy.

In the evaluation questionnaire he answered at the end of the engagement, without me present, Cláudio recorded the distance between what he had expected, a market study, and what he received: a complete strategy with a working business platform.

The validation that does not depend on words came next. Diaplant hired me, with the title of Growth Architect, to put the playbook into practice from the inside. Over the following seven months the site went from prototype to production, with the digital assistant and content personalisation behind it. The company recommends the work to anyone who asks for references.

This case has limits, and I would rather state them than hide them. The work was pro bono, as part of my master's project, approved at NOVA IMS. A single case shows that the model is possible; generalising would take more cases. I present no sales or traffic figures, because none were measured: what I show are the deliverables and the client's own assessment. After the engagement I was an employee of Diaplant, a relationship that has since ended, and the reader should weigh that when reading me. The full version of the case, with methodology and limitations set out at length, is available on request.

If your company is small, ambitious and deciding what to do with AI, that is exactly what I work on. Get in touch