How AI Can Transform the Wine Industry

Ryan Davis,Manager, Automation Technology General Mills

Artificial intelligence has transformed every facet of every industry and the wine industry is no exception to this.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to change the wine industry forever over the next decade. AI implementations for the wine industry are minimal right now but AI promises to be one of those immersive technologies integrated, one way or another in everything we do. AI could affect anything from how we buy wine, to how we grow vines in the vineyard, to how we judge wine, according to a growing number of wine experts.

AI has already advanced to the point that it can suggest matching the correct wine with a particular meal, and the versatility of that sort of virtual sommelier" is likely to increase dramatically in the future. Think about how AI-powered virtual assistants inside the home, such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple's Siri, are already changing how we search for wine online, to understand how this can happen.

The future of retail wine sales may also be influenced by the AI-powered recommendation engine. Instead of interacting at your local retail wine store with wine sales clerks, you might communicate with a friendly, AI-powered robot that roams the aisles, just waiting for an opportunity to share its expertise with you.

But before the wine ever makes it to a retail store shelf, what about AI's position in the wine industry? Some winemakers are already experimenting in the vineyard with AI-powered machines that can assist them with problems like soil management. Autonomous flying drones will tell grape growers precisely what vines need to be watered within a decade and will assist with all kinds of soil problems.

Human senses are meeting a robot near you thanks to breakthroughs in AI. Think about how speech and language can now be understood by AI-powered algorithms, and how machine vision can now see the same things as human vision. And now, AI-powered bots will soon be imbued with a sense of taste that is as good as or better than a human wine critic’s.

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