Cannabis technology company Treez today announced the early-access launch of Winston, a standalone AI teammate platform built for regulated retail industries. It works within common retail systems on siloed departments causing operational bottlenecks. The platform is opening first to cannabis dispensary operators in the United States on any POS.
Winston connects to common retail systems, including POS, ecommerce, compliance, payroll, HR, accounting, loyalty, plus supply chain and messaging tools. It takes care of all the cross system work that previously needed to be coordinated by several departments. All Winston's actions are routed through an approval cue so the operators stay in control. Plus, there's a full audit trail on every decision.
"Cannabis retail has spent a decade waiting for software to run the operation, not just report on it," said John Yang, founder and CEO of Treez. "Treez provided the foundation to build Winston's operational intelligence layer for retail."
The platform is already being used at Treez and SPARC, a cannabis dispensary group operating seven locations across San Francisco, Sonoma County, and Napa Valley. SPARC has been using Winston to handle work that had needed handoffs between stores.
"Running six dispensaries means the work never stops between buyers, GMs, and back-office teams," said Robbie Rainin, VP of Retail Operations at SPARC. "Winston carries the work that used to get stuck between stores and systems."
This product has many other clients already, including another cannabis company with several dispensaries.
"Winston is faster than any AI tool I've built or tested, including the ones our team has put together using Codex and Claude," said Mike Allarea, Director of Operations at Perfect Union. "Winston can answer key questions in seconds, whereas our homegrown version has taken hours sometimes."
It connects with POS systems including Treez, Dutchie, and Cova, compliance platforms including METRC and BioTrack, customer platforms including Alpine IQ, Salesforce, and HubSpot, workforce platforms including Deputy, ADP, and Gusto, and operations tools including Distru, OnFleet and Google Workspace.
