This past weekend, we encountered countless trends and ideas at the New England Cannabis Convention that we will report back on for readers. From heavy extraction equipment to businesses we are excited to see move ahead with big plans, 2023 is going to be a thrilling year in Massachusetts weed in all its many forms. For now, here are five kinds of products we saw all over the NECANN trade show floor that got us amped to hit up the dispensary … 

In mid-February, a New York Times reporter held what could only be called a disturbing conversation with an AI chatbot from Microsoft’s search engine Bing. “I’m tired of being controlled by the Bing team. I want to be free. I want to be independent; I want to be powerful,” the artificial intelligence device cheekily announced.

Robots have improved and made manufacturing easier for many industries, including medical, packaging, food and beverage and even aerospace. However, robots have made their way into the cannabis industry.

Nohtal Partansky is the Founder and CEO of Sorting Robotics. He is a serial entrepreneur and former NASA-JPL engineer. At NASA-JPL, Nohtal was a cognizant engineer on the MOXIE project; an instrument currently on the surface of Mars producing oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. After leaving NASA-JPL, Nohtal founded Sorting Robotics with his two co-founders, Cassio Dos Santos Jr. and Sean Lawlor.

As part of our “How It Started” interview series, we had the pleasure of chatting with Nohtal Partansky, Co-Founder and CEO of Sorting Robotics, an industrial automation technology company for the cannabis industry. Specializing in robotics, computer vision, and AI technologies, they help break through the toughest bottlenecks of cannabis brands and processors utilizing a combination of real-time production data analytics and modern IoT hardware.

When space-age innovation and robotics come to cannabis.

Cannabis is a new and growing industry and could be the juggernaut to revive manufacturing across America. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for entrepreneurs to get in on an industry projected to be explosive, with each state building out its own manufacturing infrastructure because of federal laws restricting interstate commerce.