LetsGrow’s New Growi Assistant Lets Greenhouse Growers Ask Their Data Questions in Plain Language

A modern commercial greenhouse produces a steady stream of numbers. Temperature and humidity in every compartment, irrigation volumes, light levels, crop registrations, pest counts. The data has never been easier to collect. The harder part, as LetsGrow itself argues, is knowing which of those numbers needs attention this morning.

LetsGrow.com, a greenhouse data platform based in the Netherlands, is betting that the answer is to let growers simply ask. Starting today, Oct. 12, 2026, the company is making its Intelligent Assistance tools available to all LetsGrow.com users through a free tier, according to an announcement published by the trade outlet HortiDaily. The package combines a conversational AI assistant called Growi with automated daily and weekly reports designed to bring the most relevant observations directly to the grower.

The problem it is built for

LetsGrow’s announcement names the problem directly: dashboard fatigue. Growers are expected to oversee more crops, compartments and locations, while the information available on climate, irrigation, crop performance and integrated pest management keeps growing. “More information is available than ever,” the announcement says, “but identifying what actually requires attention becomes increasingly time-consuming.”

The company has been in the data business for a long time. LetsGrow says it was founded in 2001, in part through an initiative of Wageningen University & Research to make the university’s crop models available to growers over what was then a very new internet. Today it reports more than 2,000 growers using its platform in more than 45 countries, and it is part of Batenburg Techniek, a Dutch technical services group. Earlier this month we looked at Hoogendoorn’s new 360° Control Room, where LetsGrow is one piece of a larger system. This launch is different: it is a product that any LetsGrow user can open starting today.

Reports that point to the problem

The first half of Intelligent Assistance is a set of automated reports. They analyze greenhouse performance and highlight where attention may be needed, so a grower does not have to review every crop, compartment and dashboard one by one. Growers choose which crops and topics to follow and receive focused reports daily or weekly.

LetsGrow describes a division of labor between the two. Daily reports are meant to support operational decisions, while weekly reports help reveal broader patterns. Each report gives context on the observations it flags, with the option to jump straight into the underlying data or keep investigating with Growi. Reports can also be shared across teams, which the company says can help an organization develop a more consistent way of working with its data.

At launch, the automated reports cover four areas: Climate, Irrigation, Crop and IPM. Energy and Nutrition are planned to follow.

Growi: ask instead of dig

The second half is Growi, a conversational assistant built into the platform. Instead of building charts by hand, a grower can type a question about their own greenhouse. The examples LetsGrow gives are practical ones: “Why is this crop performing differently from another crop?” or “Which compartments are deviating from the strategy?” When the company first previewed the assistant in June, it offered others, such as why a 24-hour temperature is lagging behind the strategy, or which climate factors are having the greatest impact on the current plant balance.

According to LetsGrow, Growi combines the user’s greenhouse data with horticultural knowledge and grower-specific context to answer and explain. It can produce charts, tables and other visualizations inside the conversation, which the company says helps growers investigate deviations, compare crops or growing periods, and prepare for crop meetings without assembling the data themselves.

The free tier includes the full Growi functionality, according to the announcement. LetsGrow first showed Intelligent Assistance publicly at GreenTech Amsterdam in June, with a stage session titled “Beyond Dashboard Fatigue: From Raw Data to AI-Driven Insights.”

Who stays in charge

Any AI tool that reads a farm’s data raises two fair questions: whose data is it using, and who makes the call? On the first, LetsGrow’s product page says Intelligent Assistance uses only the greenhouse data and context a user already has access to in LetsGrow.com, and that existing access permissions determine which data is used.

On the second, the company’s message is consistent. “We believe growers should always remain in control,” Gabriël van der Kruijk, LetsGrow.com’s product and technology director, said in the launch announcement. “The challenge today is no longer simply having access to data, but finding the right information at the right moment and understanding what to do with it. With Intelligent Assistance, we want to make that process much easier: showing growers where to focus, helping them understand what is happening and giving them direct access to horticultural expertise through Growi.”

It is worth keeping the source in mind. The details here come from LetsGrow and its announcements, and the company has not published independent measurements of how much time or crop performance the tools add. The more useful takeaway for most readers is the design idea behind them.

What a backyard greenhouse can borrow

LetsGrow’s customers are commercial growers, and nothing in the launch involves Arizona operations or home hobbyists. But the thinking behind it scales down surprisingly well, and Arizona has its own deep bench in this field. The University of Arizona’s Controlled Environment Agriculture Center in Tucson has spent years researching sensing and control in greenhouses, with published work on topics such as plant-response-based control strategies, machine vision for early detection of plant water stress, and wireless sensor networks for real-time crop monitoring. The center’s own guidance makes a point any grower can use: integrating sensors and control systems, paired with an understanding of the plant and its needs, helps you manage a growing space more efficiently.

For a hobby greenhouse, shade house or even a covered patio, that can start small. A UA Backyard Gardener sheet recommends an inexpensive minimum-maximum thermometer for learning your own microclimate and suggests recording the readings. That simple log is the home version of a climate report.

Three habits from the LetsGrow approach translate directly. First, write down a strategy, even a simple one, such as the temperature range you want your seedlings to stay in. Without a plan, there is nothing to measure a deviation against. Second, separate the daily look from the weekly one. A quick morning check catches a stuck vent or a dry tray, while a weekly review of the log shows slower trends like nights getting colder or a bench that always runs warm. Third, ask a specific question before you go looking. “Why are the plants on the east bench slower?” is answerable. “How is everything doing?” rarely is.

In the low desert, where a fall afternoon can still turn a small greenhouse into an oven and a clear winter night can drop it near freezing, those habits pay off quickly. The tools will look different in a Pinal County backyard than in a Dutch tomato house. The idea is the same: collect what matters, let the numbers tell you where to look, and keep the final decision in the grower’s hands.