Food and beverage businesses get ready for AI future

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming more accessible to food and beverage businesses. The challenge is moving beyond the hype of AI and identifying practical, commercially relevant applications.

Knowing where, why and how to use AI tools was one of the central messages shared by FaBA Innovation Pathways AI Workshop Facilitator and UQ Business School PhD candidate Joel Andrade during his keynote contribution at the Food South Australia summit in Adelaide.

Andrade said businesses should look beyond individual tools and consider a more important question: What business or customer problem are we actually trying to solve?

During his presentation, Andrade focused on the ways AI is transforming customer experience, innovation and decision-making across the food and beverage value chain. Drawing on his research into AI-enabled personalisation, he highlighted the growing potential for businesses to use AI to better understand consumer needs, respond to changing preferences, and create more relevant and meaningful interactions.

“The value of AI does not come from adopting the newest technology,” Andrade said.

“It comes from applying the right technology to a clearly understood problem, while strengthening the decisions, capabilities and relationships that already sit within the business.”

For food and beverage companies, this distinction is critical. AI can support consumer research, product ideation, demand forecasting, marketing, operational planning, personalised recommendations and customer engagement.

But introducing AI without a clear strategic purpose can create more noise than value.

The businesses most likely to benefit will not necessarily be those that adopt AI swiftly, rather those that understand where it can augment human expertise, improve decision-making and address genuine friction within their operations or customer experience.

This requires more than choosing the right tools. It requires a considered approach to implementation:

• Beginning with the problem rather than the technology
• Building trust alongside innovation
• Keeping humans at the centre.

Where to begin: start with the problem, not the technology

For businesses considering where to begin, the first step should not be selecting an AI platform or pursuing a particular tool. It should identify a meaningful business or customer problem and determine whether AI is best suited to help address it.

• Where are teams spending excessive time searching for, organising or interpreting information?
• Which decisions are being made without sufficient consumer or market insight?
• Where are customers encountering confusion, friction or unmet needs?
• Which activities involve repetitive analysis but still depend on human judgement?

Beginning with questions such as these shifts the focus away from adopting AI for its own sake. And encourages businesses to apply the technology with a clear purpose, a defined outcome, and a stronger understanding of the value it is expected to create.

Building trust alongside innovation

As businesses look to reap the benefits of AI by integrating it into their operations, products and customer interactions, they need to consider not only what the technology can do but also how its use will be understood and experienced by the people affected by it.

These benefits can quickly be undermined if customers are uncertain about how their information is being used, employees do not trust the system’s outputs, or people feel they have lost visibility or control.

For instance, personalisation may create more relevant experiences, but it can also raise concerns about privacy, transparency, authenticity and control. Consumers may appreciate an AI system that helps them choose a suitable product, while reacting differently if they feel their personal information has been used in ways they did not expect.

Responsible implementation is not separate from innovation. It is part of creating an AI application that customers and employees will be willing to use.

Businesses should be able to explain what an AI system is doing, what information it relies upon, where human oversight remains and how customers can retain meaningful choice.

Keeping humans at the centre

While AI can provide speed, scale and analytical capability, for now, it cannot replace the contextual knowledge held by food scientists, product developers, manufacturers, marketers, founders and consumers.

Human judgement remains essential when interpreting AI-generated insights, assessing commercial feasibility, understanding sensory expectations and considering the ethical or reputational consequences of a decision. This is particularly important in food and beverage, where purchasing decisions are shaped not only by price and convenience, but also by culture, identity, health, trust, taste and emotional connection.

AI adoption must therefore be approached as a process of augmentation rather than replacement.

“The goal should be to combine the strengths of AI with the strengths of human experts,” Andrade said.

Image credit: iStock.com/dusanpetkovic