The Royal Horticultural Society Partners With Publicis Sapient to Launch Generative AI-powered Chatbotanist

The Royal Horticultural Society and Publicis Sapient, a digital business transformation company, today announced a partnership to launch the RHS Chatbotanist, a bespoke Generative AI-enabled tool powered by Publicis Sapient.

The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), a 200-year-old gardening charity, first sought Publicis Sapient’s digital business transformation expertise to devise a revolutionary gardening app, integrating the company’s core SPEED - strategy, product, experience, engineering and data & AI - capabilities in a move towards building its digital future. The mobile RHS Grow app launched in May 2023, bringing RHS’s two-century-long expertise to users’ fingertips. Using AI, it allows for instant plant identification, personalised plant collections with custom-care guidance and wishlists for future greenery.

The second stage of the partnership is the launch of the RHS Chatbotanist, which utilises RHS’s abundant knowledge and expert advice providing RHS members with highly reliable, validated gardening information at their fingertips. The RHS Chatbotanist is a holistic service powered by generative AI algorithms, enabling users to discover and find supportive content that is right for them.  The algorithm has been trained on the output of RHS’s horticultural advice over the last 5 years, to answer gardeners’ questions by its collective expertise via an AI-enabled chat.

The Beta launch of the RHS Chatbotanist will be available to RHS’s 630,000 members starting in September 2023.

“We’re thrilled to partner with and support The Royal Horticultural Society in its transformation journey.  The launch of the RHS Chatbotanist, powered by Publicis Sapient, will emphasise the charity’s support for everyone who wants to grow plants: world-class knowledge and deep expertise honed over two centuries. Using generative AI, the bot will give all users access to the most trustworthy, validated knowledge and advice to help them become better gardeners,” said Nigel Vaz, CEO of Publicis Sapient.

“We are delighted to be partnering with Publicis Sapient, a leading digital business transformation company with strong expertise in artificial intelligence, to create support for RHS members and help more of the UK’s 30 million gardeners with the RHS Grow app,” said Martine Parnell, Director of Members, Marketing and Digital from The Royal Horticultural Society.

“We’re excited about how technology is changing the way that RHS utilises its amazing depth of knowledge honed over centuries. We look forward to a successful partnership and to the delivery of the RHS Chatbotanist later this year,”  said Jon Simpson, Director of IT from the Royal Horticultural Society.

The revolutionary new RHS Chatbotanist will be available free for RHS members to test from September and available to users of the new RHS Grow app later in the autumn.

Publicis Sapient is a technology company that provides enterprise AI platforms and services. With over 30 years of digital business transformation experience, we enable enterprise clients to transform how they operate and serve their customers, unlocking new value and enabling them to thrive in an AI-driven world. Our platforms Sapient Slingshot, Sapient Bodhi and Sapient Sustain use AI built off this deep enterprise context to help organizations modernize their legacy tech systems, build agentic solutions, and automate their IT operations.  The combination of our AI platforms and the expertise of our people enables us to deliver faster and more effective outcomes through solutions that are specific to the unique needs of our clients’ businesses, their industries and their customers.  Publicis Sapient is the technology hub of Publicis Groupe, uniting 20,000 people worldwide across 28 countries. For more information, visit publicissapient.com.

Since our formation in 1804, the RHS has grown into the UK’s leading gardening charity, touching the lives of millions of people. Perhaps the secret to our longevity is that we’ve never stood still. In the last decade alone we’ve taken on the largest hands-on project the RHS has ever tackled by opening the new RHS Garden Bridgewater in Salford, Greater Manchester, and invested in the science that underpins all our work by building RHS Hilltop – The Home of Gardening Science.

We have committed to being net positive for nature and people by 2030. We are also committed to being truly inclusive and to reflect all the communities of the UK.

Across our five RHS gardens we welcome more than three million visitors each year to enjoy over 34,000 different cultivated plants. Events such as the world famous RHS Chelsea Flower Show, other national shows, our schools and community work, and partnerships such as Britain in Bloom, all spread the shared joy of gardening to wide-reaching audiences.

Throughout it all we’ve held true to our charitable core – to encourage and improve the science, art and practice of horticulture – to share the love of gardening and the positive benefits it brings.

For more information visit www.rhs.org.uk.

RHS Registered Charity No. 222879/SC038262