One of the many education events that took place at Canadian Produce Marketing Association’s 2021 Fresh Week was the webinar Emerging Technologies: The Roaring 20s. The webinar was hosted by Scott Penberthy, director of applied AI at Google.
Penberthy spoke in the learning lounge about how artificial intelligence is changing the world — and by extension the produce industry — as we know it.
He noted how data is helping us to increase life expectancy, decrease crime rates and increase income above extreme poverty. “80 is the new 40,” Penberthy said.
Everyone has a supercomputer in their hands and can change the world. Decreased pesticide use on lettuce is only one advancement when considering applied AI. Penberthy explained how AI learns and about how it can use data to help predict crop health. But that is only one example. With practice and patience, partnered with AI’s ability to learn, the produce industry can prosper, he said.
Penberthy detailed the grocery boom during the pandemic and how AI has thrived. One example he used was Ocado’s shopping robots. Online shopping saw a spike during the pandemic and Ocado used this to opportunity to learn about consumer shopping behavior, use AI and grow. Penberthy describe it as “a peek into the future.”
Another example of how AI is advancing the produce industry is paperwork or documentation. Simple enough, right? Maybe to a computer. Penberthy detailed how AI can be used to input, prepare, classify, extract, determine relationships and uptrain all the data from these documents.
“When you are talking about produce, well, how much weight, how is it packaged and where did it come from,” Penberthy said.
