AIQ Flows Is Here. If You’re Still Building Automations the Old Way, It’s Time to Stop.

Most dispensaries running Alpine IQ have had some version of automated journeys in place for a while. A welcome message when someone joins the loyalty program. A win-back campaign for customers who go quiet. Maybe a birthday send. The logic was always there. The execution was just painful.

You built an audience. You scheduled a campaign against it. You hoped the timing was right and that the customer was actually opted into the channel you were sending on. If you wanted a second touch, you built a second campaign. If you wanted to branch based on what the customer did, you started over. Every “automation” was really just a series of manually managed campaigns dressed up to look like a system.

That is the problem AIQ Flows solves. And it launched in February 2026.

What Flows Actually Is

Flows is a visual journey builder inside Alpine IQ. You build connected sequences of nodes on a canvas: triggers, delays, message sends, splits, loyalty actions. The platform executes them automatically based on real customer behavior.

The important word there is connected. In the old model, each campaign lived in isolation. Flows treats the entire journey as one object. You can see it, edit it, and measure it as a single thing instead of hunting across five different menus to understand what is happening.

A basic Welcome Flow looks like this: customer joins the loyalty program, flow fires immediately, sends a welcome email, waits three days, sends a brand education email, waits four more days, sends a best sellers email. That is the template AIQ ships out of the box. It takes ten minutes to set up and it is already better than most of what operators have running today.

But the real value is what you can build beyond that.

AIQ’s official Flows documentation is also worth bookmarking as you build.

Why Channel Splits Matter More Than Most Operators Realize

The single biggest mistake I see in welcome flows, and lifecycle flows generally, is the assumption that every customer is reachable the same way. Build an email sequence, done. But what about the customer who is SMS-opted-in only? They enter the flow, hit the email node, and either get nothing or get stuck.

Flows lets you handle this properly. You add a Split node right after the trigger that checks email opt-in status. Yes path gets the email sequence. No path hits another split that checks SMS opt-in. Yes to SMS gets a text sequence. No to SMS checks push. No to push exits gracefully.

Nobody gets stuck. Nobody gets the wrong channel. Nobody gets excluded from your welcome journey because they happen to prefer texts over email.

This is not complicated logic. But it was genuinely difficult to build in the old campaign-based model. In Flows it takes a few extra nodes and five minutes.

The Purchase Check Before the Discount

The other thing I build into every welcome flow, and every post-purchase flow, for that matter, is a purchase check before any discount goes out.

Here is the problem with sending a first-purchase offer to everyone in a welcome flow: some percentage of those customers have already bought. They came in on day one, made a purchase, and are now sitting in your welcome sequence waiting to receive an incentive they do not need. You are giving away margin for nothing.

A Split node that checks number of purchases before the discount node costs you nothing to build and saves you from discounting customers who were already going to buy. The yes path (already purchased) gets a different message, maybe a loyalty recap or a product recommendation. The no path (has not purchased yet) gets the offer.

This is basic retention logic. Casino operators have been doing it for decades. Flows makes it straightforward to implement in cannabis retail for the first time.

Timing: Closer to Real-Time Than You Think

One of the underappreciated advantages of Flows over the old audience-based model is timing. Traditional AIQ audiences run on an overnight processing cycle. A customer who joins your loyalty program at noon on Monday might not receive your welcome email until Tuesday morning. That is a 12 to 24 hour gap on your most important first impression.

Flows evaluates opt-in and signup events in five to twenty minutes. That is not quite real-time, but it is close enough to matter. A customer who joins your program in the evening gets a welcome message that night, not the next morning when they have already forgotten about it.

Purchase data and transaction history still run on the overnight cycle, so purchase-triggered flows will have some lag. But for opt-in events, form submissions, and loyalty signups, the triggers that matter most for welcome flows, Flows is significantly faster than anything you could build with scheduled campaigns.

What You Can Build With It

The pre-built templates AIQ ships are a reasonable starting point: Welcome Series, Abandoned Cart, Post-Purchase, Reorder Reminders, Win-Back, Loyalty and Rewards. If you have never built lifecycle automations before, start with one of these, customize the messaging, and launch it. Getting something live is better than building the perfect flow that never ships.

For operators who want to go further, Flows supports:

Loyalty actions directly in the journey. You can gift points or issue a discount as a node in the flow, not as a separate process outside of it. A customer reaches a specific step and the reward applies automatically.

AI Split nodes. You can add an AI-evaluated yes/no condition as a branch in the flow. The condition has to be phrased as a yes/no question. This opens up the ability to route customers based on external signals, though it is an advanced feature and worth getting the basics right first.

Multiple triggers per flow. You are not limited to a single entry point. A flow can have several triggers, each routing into the same sequence or different paths depending on the logic you build.

Re-entry with cooldown. For flows where repeat participation makes sense, like a reorder reminder or a loyalty points update, you can enable re-entry with a cooldown period so customers can move through the flow more than once without immediately looping back in.

If You Have Old Automations Running, Audit Them Now

This is the part I want operators to actually act on. If you set up welcome messages, win-back campaigns, or birthday flows in AIQ a year or two ago and have not revisited them since, there is a real chance they are still running exactly as you configured them. Same logic. Same copy. Same timing. The platform has changed significantly since then.

Flows is not just a new tool. It is a better way to think about the whole category of work. The manual campaigns you built before were workarounds. Flows is the actual system. Take the next slow week and go back through whatever you have running. Document the logic. Ask whether it still reflects how your customer base actually behaves. Then rebuild it properly.

The operators who take CRM seriously are going to compound that advantage over time. Flows is the infrastructure that makes it possible.

Get the Full Reference Guide

I built a complete guide to AIQ Flows covering every node type with cannabis retail context, a full trigger and event reference, a step-by-step Welcome Flow build, launch requirements, analytics, best practices, and a troubleshooting section. It is the reference I wish existed when I started building lifecycle programs on AIQ.

It is free. Get it here: https://www.pinelandsmarketing.com/resources

Brett Hahn is the founder of Pinelands Marketing LLC and an AIQ Certified Partner. He has spent 15+ years building CRM and loyalty programs at Caesars Entertainment, Vail Resorts, Comcast, and C3 Industries.