Emerald Ridge Farm
A 33-acre family-owned wedding venue in the mountains of North Carolina replaced 2am inbox checks with an AI receptionist couples cannot tell apart from a human.
A family-owned venue, with one owner answering every lead.
Emerald Ridge Farm is a 33-acre wedding venue tucked into the mountains of North Carolina, 12 minutes from Asheville. Janice Black co-owns it with her husband and her son. They have been running weddings on the property for seven years.
Janice came into the venue from a consulting career, so she was already used to long hours on the phone. But the volume of wedding inquiries took it to another level. To keep her response time inside one to two hours, she would wake up in the middle of the night and answer leads from her phone in the dark.
It was the only way she knew to compete. And it was wearing her out.
Mikla took over the inbox, the calendar, and the follow-ups.
Emerald Ridge Farm brought Mikla in to handle the full front end of the inquiry pipeline. Mikla replies to every wedding lead in under a minute, qualifies the couple with the questions Janice cares about, and books tours directly on the venue calendar. Janice no longer touches the inbox until the couple walks through the door.
The hardest part was not the technology. It was letting go. After years of being the one and only person answering every email, handing that off to an AI agent took trust. Janice was clear that nothing had given her a reason to mistrust the system. It was simply her own discomfort with not being the one at the keyboard.
Once she got past that, the experience shifted quickly. The Mikla team walked her through the setup over a couple of phone calls and stayed close through the transition.
Stress down. Hours back. Couples never realize it is AI.
The most measurable change is what Janice no longer does. She is not on her phone at midnight. She is not refreshing the inbox between tours. She is using that recovered time on the work that actually moves the business forward: the website, the social channels, the marketing that fills the funnel in the first place.
On the customer side, the feedback has been silent in the best way possible. Not a single couple has ever suggested that the responses were coming from an AI agent. What they notice instead is the immediacy. A couple sending venue inquiries on their lunch break gets a complete, on-brand response before they finish their sandwich, while competing venues are still hours away from replying.
For a 70-year-old venue owner, the rollout had to be smooth or it was not going to happen. It was smooth. Janice describes the Mikla portal as straightforward and easy to use, and the support team as five-star across the board.
