For some of us, the artificial intelligence (AI) is the coolest thing on Earth, for others is part of a Huxleyan dystopia. No matter what, the future of factories, including the potato processing plants, is AI.

Maybe part of a human dream of controlling everything, AI brings to processors total control of the production, minimizes  loss and improves automatically the entire chain in a plant.

Speaking with people within the industry, I have found out that, for the moment, the level of AI implementation is quite low, maybe under 10%, according to their evaluation. As a challenge, of course, the costs are an aspect to mention, and especially as the AI is not a technology that improves the production and grows the profit at the moment of implementing. It requires time and analyses to see the results and consequently financial results.

Moreover, potato processors are still reticent to share the data with equipment producers, even though the informational interchange could bring benefits for both parts of the chain. To exemplify, for processors, it brings the proper information to implement a smoother and more efficient process. For equipment producers, sharing information brings important input from within the industry, the problems that processors are dealing with, but also the ideas and solutions for these problems.

But let’s move to another issue debated by everyone these days: the unemployment brought by technology. Professor Yuval Noah Harari says that people do not know how the work field will look like in 2050, but it is a certainty that  automatic learning and robotics will influence every sector. Of course, potato processing is included, I would add.

What is next? I would say that the succeeding question is how can we analyze the data obtained, what can we get out of it, who will be in charge of that and how many resources do we have for that. This is what big breakaway1 companies already do, as a recent McKinsey Analytics survey showed.

It analyzed 1,000 companies with more than USD1bn in revenue, spanning 13 sectors and 12 geographies. Here are some of the findings:

-Breakaway companies spend more than other organizations on analytics, and they plan to increase these investments further. Two-thirds of breakaway companies (versus only 5%) already spend more than 25% of their IT budgets on analytics, a category that can include a long list of analytics-related expenditures such as data, technology, analytics talent, and embedding analytics into business-process workflows.

-Breakaway organizations are 2.5 times more likely than their peers to report having a clear data strategy and twice as likely to report strong data-governance practices that allow them to identify and prioritize data.

-Breakaway companies are 2.5 times more likely than other respondents to have a clear methodology for developing analytics models, interpreting insights, and deploying the new capabilities that they build.

-Breakaway companies are 1.5 times more likely than their peers to have deep functional expertise in the areas of data science, data engineering, data architecture, and analytics transformation.

-Breakaway companies create collaborative cultures that foster innovation and propel analytics initiatives throughout the organization.

What is your opinion about artificial intelligence? How can it improve the potato processing chain? What are your biggest concerns related to it? I am looking forward to your thoughts at ioana.oancea@mediatrade.ro!

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1. Breakaway positioning is a marketing technique in which customers recognize the product based on its features such as design, functionality, appearance, feel, luxury, distribution channel, pricing, or features. This type of marketing technique helps the brand to create its own image, or niche, which at times leads to impulsive buying. A breakaway campaign stands out, as it is able to connect with the consumer at a different level. The brands which follow breakaway strategy always try and maintain their niche. They create their own image in the mind of consumers which can’t be associated with any other brand.