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Artificial Intelligence, F&B Quality, Safety and COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic initiated a drastic change in consumer confidence and purchasing habits while redefining the approach to how select businesses approach their supply and demand for goods & services. The food and beverage, manufacturing and industrial processing industries continue to experience, respond to and rebound from these unexpected changes all while navigating a yet to be defined new normal. Now, more than ever, consumers are heavily invested in food safety as well as supply chain traceability.

The pandemic has exposed weaknesses across the value chain and many players in F&B that were not looking to invest in technology are now facing the reality that digitizing their operations is the only way to remain competitive in a post-COVID-19 landscape.

How COVID-19 affected buiness and operations... 45% Demand increase 40% Supply chain shortage 37% Demand decrease 33% Negative impact, but managing 16% Has had little impact 13% Having issues meeting higher demand 10% Cashflow is a problem 7% Business as usual •5th state of 2020

In a survey of food and beverage industry leaders conducted by PLEX systems, we can see that COVID-19 had a significant, and largely negative, impact on demand and the supply chain. These volatile changes in supply and demand were likely the worst at beginning of the pandemic in March of 2020, where uncertainty regarding lockdowns and safety were at their peak. Without the proper technology deployed and the reliance on traditional operating methods having to be redefined, these volatile swings are extremely difficult to rebound from and in effect cause ripples in the supply chain for extended periods of time.

Investing in technology, such as Artificial Intelligence, and more specifically Maestro, to address and stabilize this volatility is pivotal in the future for F&B manufacturers. The PLEX survey also showed that 10% of respondents had a cash flow problem as a result of COVID-19, which is a result of being unable to respond quickly to the unpredictable swings in demand and supply chain shortages. With Artificial Intelligence, corporations are able to be agile and nimble, responding quickly to changes in variable inputs and outputs to optimize operations and remain competitive. It’s clear that the F&B industry understands the necessity of investing in technology for the future.

Most food and beverage manufacturers say they still plan to invest in enabling technologies. Still planning to invest. Did not plan to invest, but are now. No longer planning to invest. •qt. An Stat. of of 7020

The PLEX systems survey also shows that 75% of respondents are going to invest in digital technologies as a response to changes driven by COVID-19. The top areas of investment for F&B manufacturers have shifted focused towards e-commerce as the drive for online purchasing has increased as well as supply chain upgrades, due to an increased importance on food safety. Supply chain upgrades, in particular, have been the key to their survival during this time when keeping up with extremely high food safety standards as well as trying to remain profitable has been critical.

Food safety has been a hot button issue, with many corporations like Perdue and other meat processors falling short to meet proper safety for employees, negatively impacting their production. Artificial Intelligence can address many of the safety issues for employees working within the factories as well as the quality of the actual products being produced. An example of this occurred within a poultry processing plant in Georgia, when a liquid nitrogen tank leaked and resulted in the death of six people in the plant. Investigators are having difficulties identifying which part of the operational process lead to the leak, something an end-to-end Artificial Intelligence Platform, such as Maestro, would address by taking into account the entire estate and being able to predict and prevent this events such as this from occurring.

Many F&B manufacturers and processors have been overwhelmed in their response to correct their course as a result of COVID-19. There has never been a more critical time for Artificial Intelligence to address this overwhelming condition as that is the true nature of what AI is capable of. The objective of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is to continuously ensure optimized outcomes with certainty, when so many dynamic variables impact operations that point-in-time analysis is irrelevant and the required speed, scale and depth of analysis is beyond human and standard algorithmic capabilities. This is the world we are living in as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Maestro AI is proven to deliver transformational benefit for the F&B manufacturing industry allowing clients to realize significant savings, while achieving safety and quality standards with unmatched speed to value. To learn more about Maestro AI and Elutions, contact us.

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February Series: The AI Enabled Food & Bev Revolution

The global food and beverage (F&B) manufacturing industry is a behemoth, valued at 6111.1 billion dollars as of 2020 and expected to grow at a CAGR of 7% for 2021 to reach an estimated value of $7527.5 billion in 2023. Even though COVID-19 created some pretty significant supply chain issues for the F&B market it still grew in an incredibly trying year. The industry is essential to our way of life and digital technologies are essential to the survival and growth of the industry.

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to unlock complete value chain transformation for F&B manufacturers. Mckinsey reports that, “50% of [F&B manufacturing] companies that embrace AI over the next 5-7 years have the potential to double their cash flow.”

The team at Elutions says, why wait that long?

F&B Manufacturers have never been in a better position then they are now to begin rapidly digitizing their operations with AI to reduce time to market, implement automation in feedstock to increase speed and reduce yield, to reduce resource consumption and achieve Net-Zero goals and so much more. In February 2021 Solve the Unsolvable will be exploring the applications of Artificial Intelligence in the Food and Beverage Manufacturing sector.

How can AI deliver on its promises within F&B? How can AI help corporations achieve their Net-Zero goals with increased speed? How can AI combat COVID-19 in the F&B Manufacturing sector and maintain food safety goals?

Stay tuned to this month’s series to have all of these questions and more answered.

Maestro AI is proven to deliver transformational benefit for the F&B manufacturing industry across the entire value chain at unprecedented speed to value. To learn more about Maestro AI and Elutions, contact us.

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AI & COVID-19: Optimize

To maintain operations at the onset of COVID-19, corporations took swift, unprecedented action to counteract the pandemic’s sweeping impacts on market demand, workforce, supply chain, short-term costs and liquidity. For many corporations, this involved redirecting investment from long-term initiatives to short-term remedies. For others, expediting the execution of long-term strategies was critical to survival.

Corporations that chose to accelerate, rather than delay, their digital transformation initiatives are now leveraging Artificial Intelligence to enhance employee safety and security, reduce short-term costs and improve liquidity. In the mid-term, that same investment will allow them to stabilize revenue, further reduce OPEX, prioritize CAPEX, and lay the groundwork for competitive advantage.

How will Artificial Intelligence empower corporations to build resilience and optimize performance amidst supply chain disruption?

Elutions’ highly-automated and autonomous Artificial Intelligence solution, Maestro, integrates value chain systems and infrastructure to dynamically coordinate activity and optimize net performance, improving OPEX, CAPEX, yield and revenue.

The following Artificial Intelligence use cases are paramount to building resilience and optimizing performance in industry:

  • End-to-End Operational Alignment & Planning: By overlaying and interconnecting enterprise systems, assets and processes with AI and automation, corporations gain granular visibility and foresight into enterprise-level performance and risks, and unparalleled agility in aligning operational parameters, activities and decision-making across processes, enabling otherwise unachievable improvements in operating costs, yield and revenue.

  • Dynamic Process, UCP & Yield Optimization: By enabling dynamic, system-driven performance prediction and operating parameter adjustment at each stage of production, automated Predictive Preventative Maintenance work-order creation at the asset-component level, and automated alternate control sequencing in the event of a sensor, asset or process failure, corporations autonomously optimize process efficiency and product quality while avoiding unplanned downtime, minimizing the Unit Cost of Production, maximizing effective capacity, throughput and yield, and stabilizing revenue in line with design capacity.

  • Predictive CAPEX Planning & Budgetary Prioritization: By autonomously modeling asset health, availability and use-life, business-casing the margin impact of replacement vs continued O&M, and prioritizing CAPEX projects in line with their projected impacts on safety & security, uptime and margin, corporations plan and allocate CAPEX with unparalleled precision, efficiency and flexibility, optimizing IRR.

  • Value Chain Visibility, Scenario Modeling & Strategy Execution: By overlaying and interconnecting value chain systems and processes with AI, corporations gain unprecedented visibility and foresight into value chain performance and risks, certainty in strategic planning via scenario modeling, and oversight in execution, altogether allowing corporations to proactively manage rather than reactively respond to value chain opportunities and disruption.

Beyond mid-term resilience and performance optimization, corporations have placed their bets on Artificial Intelligence to thrive in the long-term. Stay tuned for more market intelligence on how AI is helping corporations gain competitive advantage.

Up Next for NCW: Digitization and Chemical Manufacturing

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Virtual CogX: The Festival of AI & Breakthrough Technology

Elutions is proud to announce their Lead Partnership of The CogX Global Leadership Summit and Festival of AI & Breakthrough Technology, June 8th- June 10th. In a world that is constantly in flux to adapt to impacts of COVID-19, CogX made the difficult decision to virtualize their event. We fully align with this decision as they themselves said,

“There are important, and in some cases urgent, topics to discuss: both the immediate challenges presented by COVID-19, and to play our part in helping restart the economy by connecting, collaborating and supporting each other.”

Relevant, now more than ever, is CogX’s 2020 Event Theme- How Do we Get the Next 10 years Right? Outlined below are the ways in which the conference aims to address this massive question:

– Move the conversation forward with concrete actions

– Reframe the climate emergency as the biggest economic opportunity in the last 200 years

–Increase understanding of the current Covid-19 pandemic and champion innovative solutions

The global pandemic has allowed many of us, corporations and individuals, to pause and re-evaluate what the next ten years will look like. It is clear now that the businesses that successfully and swiftly adopt to automated, autonomous applications of AI and rethink their business models will be the ones realizing a competitive advantage.

We will be hosting a virtual expo booth across the three days, June 8th through June 10th, where attendees can reach out to our team to learn more. We will also be hosting virtual lunch and learns, happy hours, and coffee chats. Our Managing Director of EMEA, Jamie Devlin, will also be a featured speaker on Industry 4.0 and sustainable supply chain, Monday, June 8th, 5pm BST (12pm EST).

For a limited time, we are offering our readers, interested in attending our speaking events, the chance to receive a Gold Pass, free of charge. Please click here and provide your full name, title at your company, email address and phone number to receive a Gold Pass.

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AI & COVID-19

Throughout modern history, several infectious diseases have spread with sufficient speed, scale and severity to be considered pandemics. Malaria, Smallpox, H1N1, and HIV/AIDS, which remains active, made the list. COVID-19, however, is in a league of its own. The last pandemic of comparable economic impact, if not on human life, was the Spanish Flu, which directly followed WWI and wrought havoc in a significantly less interconnected world than the one in which we live today.

The Global Impacts of COVID-19 have already been unprecedented. “Stay-at-home,” “social-distancing” and travel and trade restrictions imposed to protect public health have had devastating impacts on the global economy, supply chain and employment. How and when this pandemic will end remains unclear. What is certain is that businesses now face an existential threat, and their leaders must take immediate action to set and execute strategies to weather the storm and ensure they are prepared for future economic, operational or human crisis.

In a time when “non-essential” businesses have been forced to shutter operations or shift to remote collaboration, and “essential” businesses face unparalleled demand alongside novel operational and supply chain challenges, how can manufacturers, O&G companies, airports, utilities, universities and other major businesses survive?

If they adapt quickly, can they thrive?

The answer to this question for industry lies in the adoption of end-end Artificial Intelligence.

Over the next few weeks, we will dive into the major business impacts of COVID-19 and how Elutions‘ Artificial Intelligence platform, Maestro, is addressing them across multiple verticals.  We strongly believe that businesses that successfully and swiftly adopt automated, autonomous applications of AI and rethink their business models will be the ones realizing a competitive advantage once we return to a “new normal”.

Inspired by industrial trends a multitude of sources, reports by McKinsey and many others, Elutions’ AI & COVID-19 Series will specifically address the themes of Survival, Optimization, and Transformation. 

Survival: Artificial Intelligence applied immediately to stabilize business operations.

Optimization: Artificial Intelligence’s intermediary impacts, growing and preparing for a “new normal.”

Transformation: Artificial Intelligence’s long-term impacts in a post-pandemic landscape.

Check back in with us weekly for new content on how to address the business impacts of COVID-19 through the strategic application of end-end Artificial Intelligence.

Up Next for NCW: Digitization and Chemical Manufacturing

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Enterprise Artificial Intelligence – Academic Theory or Ready for Primetime?

Solvetheunsolvable has already explored various aspects of consumer AI and products purporting to leverage AI technologies, but is AI for Enterprise ready for primetime?

Investors aren’t the only ones betting big on Artificial Intelligence, it turns out Higher Education is also investing heavily into the space. With heavy investment in research and development, enterprise level AI seems to be having a rocky start.  Earlier this month Northeastern University allocated $50 million to an Institute for Experiential Artificial Intelligence. This institute will be dedicated to uniting leading experts to solve the world’s unsolvable problems.

“This new institute, the first of its kind, will focus on enabling artificial intelligence and humans to collaborate interactively around solving problems in health, security, and sustainability. We believe that the true promise of AI lies not in its ability to replace humans, but to optimize what humans do best.”


Northeastern President Joseph E. Aoun

This isn’t Northeastern’s first step into the world of Artificial Intelligence and Automation. They already have an Institute for Experiential Robotics that is bringing together engineers, sociologists and other experts, including economists, to design and build robots with abilities to learn and execute human behaviors.  Northeastern isn’t just building Institutes for experts to conduct research, they are making it a priority to prepare their students for success in the age of artificial intelligence. They have an entire curriculum dedicated to what they call, humanics which is a key part of their strategic plan, Northeastern 2025.

Northeastern 2025 Promo Video

“We are building on substantial strengths across all colleges in the university,” said Carla Brodley, dean of the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. “Experiential AI is highly relevant to our mission.”

Though Northeastern is an example of one university betting heavily on AI, they are not alone in their quest to equip students with proper education for the AI-enabled future. In fact, government agencies are getting involved in funding AI in Education. The UK has pledged to invest £400 million in math, digital and technical education through the government’s AI sector deal to protect Britain’s technology sector amid Brexit and an additional £13 million for postgraduate education on AI. In the US, just a few days ago, the National Science Foundation announced a joint federal program to fund research focused on artificial intelligence at colleges, universities and nonprofit or nonacademic organizations focused on educational or research activities. 

The National Science Foundation is awarding $120 million to fund planning grants and support up to six institutes, but there’s a catch. Each institute must have a principal focus on at least one of six themes:

  • Trustworthy AI
  • Foundations of Machine Learning
  • AI-Driven Innovation in Agriculture and the Food System
  • AI-Augmented Learning
  • AI for Accelerating Molecular Synthesis and Manufacturing
  • AI for Discovery in Physics

As universities and governments bet big on the future of AI and education, it underscores the importance of AI on a global scale in the future, but does it call into question the current existence of AI solutions ready to take business to the next level? Utilizing AI and automation will be imperative for corporations to remain competitive and for the advancement of business, but when will the floodgates be swept open, and by who, remains a mystery.

Will you leap into the future and embrace AI now? How do you see the futuristic vision of enterprise AI transform your business? Challenge Solvetheunsolvable with your business conundrum or leave your thoughts in the comments below and let’s explore what AI can do for you. 

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