The AI Reality Check
Ether Botanicals leans on paid ads and AI for analysis
Sebastian Arango Baloyra founded Ether Botanicals LLC after first being introduced to the idea behind it at 16, then spent years learning the business from logistics and coding to customer relations. The company sells ethnobotanically related products, and its story is worth reading because it shows a founder using AI for the back office while still drawing a hard line around human judgment.
AI has taken over statistical analysis, coding and troubleshooting at Ether Botanicals, but not the interpersonal work. The founder’s view is simple: use AI to support the business, not to replace the human decisions that keep it believable and useful.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
I was introduced to the idea that founded Ether Botanicals LLC three years prior, when I was sixteen years old. I always had a keen interest in ethnobotanicals and the line between plants and the soul. From that point forward, I spent several hours, days, weeks, and months formulating an understanding of how the business works. From logistics to coding to customer relations. I formed the framework behind what a successful "Ether Botanicals" looks like in practice.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Most of our business comes from paid advertisements. To put it plainly, this is not ideal; ad costs revenue, and who wouldn’t want to save the cash? Plus, at any moment, ad providers can shut us down for unintended policy violations, given that our company’s stance, being ethnobotanically related, isn’t aligned with ad longevity. Ads keep operations moving and cash flowing, which is at the core of any business, so until we develop another more substantive option, this is what we’ve got.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
We’ve handed over a large portion of statistical analysis, coding, and troubleshooting operations to AI. AI performs very well at these tasks due to its ability to compute and align related given information to known solutions. Its formulaic approach to problem-solving is just that: a formula. When it comes to reenacting human approaches and applying them to interpersonal problems, AI at this current time (2026) usually falls short of satisfactory. Whether that be linguistic, humorous, or even interpretive, we, as a collective, need to remember: AI is not alive. Case in point.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
Not yet, but that’s certainly a real possibility as time goes on and the company grows.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Use AI, but not at the expense of your own humanity — use it as an aid to your work, not a replacement for your judgment. Keeping the human part intact is exactly what keeps you from becoming dependent on it.
Thank you to Sebastian Arango Baloyra and the team at ETHER BOTANICALS LLC for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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