By Phil Kafarakis, IFMA President & CEO
September 2024
- AI is transforming industries, including food-away-from-home, by enhancing jobs and creating efficiencies, as highlighted by food industry leaders during IFMA’s recent virtual Marketing & Sales Conference.
- Despite growing awareness, most Americans are still unfamiliar with AI, but applications like ChatGPT have sparked rapid adoption across sectors, with many tech giants releasing their own AI tools.
- Government regulation is likely on the horizon, with international treaties and Congressional efforts underway to ensure that AI benefits industries and consumers while addressing potential impacts.
It seems clear that AI (Artificial Intelligence) is here to stay, even if we’re still working out what to do with it in our businesses. The accepted consensus is that it will make personal lives and industry run more smoothly and profitably, though the full scope of what AI can do and how it can be integrated into current roles continues to develop.
Pew research conducted late in 2023 indicated that only one-in-three adults have heard a lot about AI, although most Americans (90%) said they’d heard at least something. Now, we live in an age where information moves quickly, so those numbers are surely shifting, but overall societal awareness is still low, and there are concerns about how AI can be appropriately used in daily life.
Many of my food industry contacts are telling me that AI will transform what and how we do business across our industry. That's already begun.
During a session on AI held during IFMA’s recent virtual Marketing & Sales Conference, three leaders from across the food-away-from-home ecosystem discussed how AI is currently being used within their companies and what that might mean for workers.
Azeem Kapadia of Conagra – representing the manufacturer voice – explained their use of an “AI Kitchen” where a cross-functional team gathers ideas for AI use and prioritizes the ideas, “always keeping human beings in the loop.”
Representing College & University foodservice, Garrett DiStefano from the University of Massachusetts Amherst said they view AI as “representing a transformative step to help create better experiences for our customers.”
“For us, AI enhances jobs, it doesn’t take them away,” stated Brandon Beals from Dot Foods. Kapadia was quick to agree, “When people ask if AI will take their jobs away, I say ‘No, but your job may be replaced by someone just like you who uses AI.’”
When OpenAI, a US research company released ChatGPT in late 2022, the application (app) opened up the world of easy human interaction with complex computer algorithms. An extremely advanced chatbot, the app is always running in order to capture as much intelligence and data as possible.
This honestly seems like a business dream made real. The food industry, immense as it is, runs on constantly evolving data – be it farm reports, consumer behavior research, global economic developments, transportation grid updates, what have you. Moving trillions of dollars of food constantly, consistently, and safely is the only way to succeed. Thank heavens there’s technology to help!
Of course, ChatGPT just opened the floodgates to the marketplace, all the tech giants released their own versions of artificial intelligent chatbots. Google immediately introduced us to Bard; Microsoft placed OpenAI’s model into its Bing search engine; Meta débuted LLaMA; and Anthropic came out with Claude. All intended to assist in making personal and professional lives much more efficient and productive.
The next step will inevitably be government regulation. Reuters recently reported that the EU, US and UK signed the “first legally binding international AI treaty.” Nationally, we already have the bi-partisan Congressional Artificial Intelligence Caucus examining developments. They state that their mandate is ”to inform policymakers of the technological, economic and social impacts of advances in AI and to ensure that rapid innovation in AI and related fields benefits Americans as fully as possible.” Can legislated regulation be far behind?
AI technology tools seem poised to make a positive impact in homes, schools, healthcare, manufacturing, hospitality, etc., etc., etc. As for food-away-from-home, I’m excited to see where we can go as an industry with AI. The potential benefits to product & menu development, ordering, shipping, warehousing, ingredient traceability, and so much more is just enormous.
At IFMA, we will continue bringing forward information on AI and all developing technologies. We have been inviting technology subject matter experts and even several executives from AI pioneering companies to address our members and share advances and business best practices at events and webinars. We will be building on that at our various events in 2025.
I look forward to learning more about it myself and to seeing just what we can accomplish together in the food-away-from-home industry. The future awaits!
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