We ran an AI Day at the "Gardens and People" festival

On 12 August the Moscow "Gardens and People" festival hosted a day dedicated to artificial intelligence. We came up with it and built it together with the organisers: EIRLab from the AI side, charmonye.com from the industry side. Here is how it went.

Why AI at a garden festival

Back in July we wrote that we were taking one day of the festival’s lecture hall for artificial intelligence. The reasoning was simple. AI has already arrived in this field, but nobody talks about it honestly. Visualising a plot from a photo, drafting a master plan and reworking it, cost estimates and specifications, catalogues for garden centres, back-and-forth with the client: someone uses all of this every day, yet it gets discussed either breathlessly or not at all. This is not an outsider’s conversation for us: charmonye.com is our own project, so master plans and cost estimates are as much our daily work as models and agents.

The festival trusted us with a day. Three weeks later we were standing in the lecture hall at Kuzminki — gardens outside the window, and inside, people who genuinely needed this.

Three talks

The day was hosted by Bulat Latypov, CEO of EIRLab. We picked speakers by one rule: no technology overviews, one concrete problem broken down in detail. The people in that room came to work out whether they could repeat it in their own office on Monday.

Elena Konchakova of TEGOLA Group talked about how she, as a senior executive, taught herself AI and started building it into her own workflow. No data science team, no separate budget — she just sat down, figured it out and started using it. The core of her message: stop being afraid, go and try it.

Gleb Kudryavtsev, founder of Career Factory and former CPO at Skyeng, joined remotely and walked through generative design and assembling cost estimates. The distance did not matter — his slides were the ones people photographed most. When someone shows an actual workflow instead of theory, the room can tell.

Alesya Vlasova, lead designer at charmonye.com, walked through her real working week: where AI genuinely saves hours, where it hands you a beautiful image with nothing behind it, and where everything has to be redone by hand. That was a colleague speaking, not a vendor — no promises of magic, just an honest breakdown. The room felt the difference immediately.

What we took away

The day confirmed what we intend to keep doing. The value appears when someone shows their work in full: the result, the mistakes, and the parts that had to be redone by hand. We take on forward-looking topics too — but the person talking about the future should be a practitioner, not someone who assembled a deck out of other people’s videos and books. And the conversation runs in the language of the field: not “neural networks are changing the world”, but “here is the master plan, here is the estimate, here is the client asking for a third revision”.

More than thirty people showed up — for a specialised AI day, inside a garden festival, in the middle of August. There were almost no free seats left.

Nobody left when the programme ended. People stayed for another hour or so, asking which tools to use for visualisation, how to handle estimates, where the model lies and what to do about it. A landscape designer, a garden centre and a manufacturer turned out to have the same questions — only at different scale. That hour, honestly, was the whole point.

What comes next

We will run AI Days again, and not only at this festival. Our thanks to the Gardens and People organisers for trusting us with the day and the space — the format earned its place, and after the conversations in that room our list of topics only got longer.

If you work in landscape, urban improvement or garden retail and are already putting AI to real use in your work, write to us. We need people with their own stories, not with talks about trends.