The AI stack behind a two-owner NYC shop

Charcuterie by Bohemian Picnics runs on three tools, and they are split by role rather than by taste. Sara Rojas, who handles finance and client work, uses ChatGPT. Luisa Ramirez, who runs the kitchen and the marketing, uses Sintra at $37 a month. Both end up in Canva, because neither AI tool can produce a finished layout. Nothing here was chosen by a technology decision; each was adopted at the point a specific job became unaffordable.

ChatGPT — Sara Rojas, inquiries and finance

A year of continuous use is the important detail. It has learned to distinguish her two businesses, the shop and the sister event-planning company, and replies in the appropriate register for each. What it runs:

• Customer inquiries. Roughly ten minutes per reply down to under a minute. It replaced an assistant she had hired the year before to help with email.
• Flower costing. A screenshot plus a colour theme and budget returns stem counts, seasonal substitutions and a per-bouquet breakdown. She says it halves the time.
• Debt and pricing. Balances, APRs and a target went in; a payoff order came back. The same pattern now handles payroll, sales ratios, food costs and store pricing.
• Proposal copy. It drafts what to write. It does not assemble the document, which is why a large event proposal still takes two to three days.

Sintra — Luisa Ramirez, marketing and menus

Luisa reached Sintra after starting with ChatGPT and trying an app from the Apple store she found unhelpful enough that she does not remember its name. Sintra is now where she goes for everything on the marketing side: catering menus, Instagram strategy, post ideas, email marketing.

She describes it as organised into what the product calls assistants — separate branches for a personal assistant, social media, email marketing — and says it comes with "around nine to twelve AI workers." At $37 a month she is explicit that the price is the point: "It is very unexpensive and it has a lot of tools, like, you know, it has even things that I don't know yet how to use."

The reported result is a 20,000-follower Instagram account, reached the week of the interview, which she attributes to what she learned through AI and Sintra. It also schedules posts and notifies her before publishing, though she still approves each one by hand and calls herself a control freak about it. Given a batch of photographs it will pick the strongest for that week and write the caption with keywords intended to help the algorithm.

Canva — both, and not by choice

Canva is where the AI output goes to become a real asset. Sara builds proposals in it and calls the process manual. Luisa moves Sintra's text into it because Sintra's own image generation garbles the words — letters that do not match what she typed, missing grammar and spelling. Transferred into Canva, she says, "it makes it perfect."

Both owners describe the same seam from opposite sides. Galina Fendikevich puts the frustration plainly during the interview: Canva is good at design and bad at copy, and the AI tools are the reverse.

What is not in the stack

Worth noting for anyone selling into a business this size. There is no automation layer, no agent framework, no integration platform. Sara knows a technical route to batch her inbox exists and has no intention of building it. As Galina says to her on the record: as a business owner with a full plate, you are not going to go and configure agents on a back end, and hiring someone to do it is a significant extra cost.

Luisa has also not connected anything to the finance side. She tried budgeting a catering order in Sintra once, early, when the app had less information in it, and it went badly enough that she never tried again — including never trying the same job in ChatGPT, which is what her co-owner uses for exactly that.

Every product named here was named by the operators. Inclusion is reporting, not endorsement.

Where this comes from

S2E2: The secret AI strategy this small NYC business uses to save thousands — the full interview with Sara Rojas and Luisa Ramirez. Listen or watch: YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.