How AI is Impacting the Future of Food
Robots in the Kitchen
Here's whay:
As a futurist, I’m always looking at the trends of automation, robotics and in particular artificial intelligence and how it’s scaling in different industries and segments of business.
The 2020s will see AI come into Transportation, Retail, Finance, and Food like never before. We know this, and in the 2030s it will extend into Education, Healthcare and Sales & Marketing in a more significant way.
These are the kinds of trends I write about every week, nearly every day. This is also a story of how Europe and North America are slipping behind. Just go to China, Japan and Korea and see for yourself.
Many restaurants have already deployed automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning, using innovations such as chatbots to guide customers through menus and help them order. Meitaun, JD.com, and Alibaba are indeed bringing a new retail and O2O convenience that is not seen in America.
- Automated stores
- Automated cafes
- Automated fast-food
- Advent of Cloud Kitchens
- Improved mobile ordering and online to offline convenience.
It’s all happening and automation is definitely coming. Old fashioned digital natives grew up with the internet. The next gen grew up with mobile. In the future, our children will be growing up with AI and robots that aren’t just a dumb algorithmic world of machine intelligence.
It’s not just Spyce startup or McDonalds that are into automating the kitchen, there’s a lot of stealth players and tech in Asia we don’t even get a chance to see.
We know fast food will become automated, it will be one of the first to fall, if you will.
In China facial recognition is being used to pay. It’s not just burger-flipping robots and pizza-making robots. You won’t need waiters in the future of food. From voice-AI interfaces to Cloud Kitchens, you might not need cooks eventually too. Jobs in the kitchen will change and an AI-human workforce will look and feel very different.
So who has an uncertain future in the future of retail and food?
- Cashiers
- Waiters
- Cooks
- Delivery people
- Restaurants that don’t keep up
- Baristas (cafe)
In the past three years alone, robot food servers have appeared in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and mainland China. The latest restaurant to employ Robo-waiters, a Japanese-themed sushi-and-barbecue eatery in Bangkok, has even fitted its bots with samurai plating and prop swords. America? Not so much.
Voice-AI, Cloud and Robotics Coming for Food
Artificial intelligence and facial recognition and LiDar enabled computer vision systems are the future of food, we just don’t know it yet. The Cloud Kitchen revolution is coming and it will be automated.
Pepper as a customer greeting robot is in his early stages. But he already has some part-time gigs. Developed by Japanese technology firm SoftBank in partnership with Mastercard, it also takes payments. It’s in use at Pizza Hut in Singapore and the French supermarket chain Carrefour.
Companies such as OTG reimagined the restaurant airport experience and replaced servers who take customer orders with self-ordering tablets. But honestly, that’s just the beginning. What’s happening in China in terms of AI innovation in brick-and-mortar retail and food experiences paired with facial recognition appears years ahead of America.
Now the Voice-AI experience is driving a lot of change as well. McDonald’s has acquired a Silicon Valley-based voice recognition firm. The technology will help improve the speed and accuracy of taking orders at Drive-Thru facilities. Rather than merely recognizing commands, it will be able to handle complex orders in multiple accents and languages, McDonald’s says.
What does it all mean? AI isn’t just showing up in the kitchen, but will soon be implicated in all of our interactions to do with food. Walmart is increasingly using AI. The automation systems in logistics will be perfected in the next two decades, everything from drones to self-driving trucks.
Would you let a robot do your cooking? Maybe you, like me, are consuming more “beyond meat” products. The future of food is being transformed by Millennial consumer preferences. In places like China, this is accelerating to include new forms of payment, convenience, better delivery options and more AI at the restaurants, POS and even replacing waiters altogether.
Automation is coming, we see little signs of it here and there. But America is going to have to keep up with China and Asia broadly speaking. The robots in the food sector are going to get smarter in the 2020s. The 2020s are beta.
China is Winning the AI Food Race
China clearly leads the automation and social credit surveillance economy of the future. The price of convenience is our data, and our food choices won’t be private. That’s okay, humans got to eat.
Investment in automation in the food sector is on the rise. In 2018, the sales value of the market in China alone amounted to more than $123 million, and by 2025 it’s estimated more than $500 million worth of robots will have been sold to the global food and beverage industry.
CREATOR, a new hamburger joint in San Francisco, claims to deliver a burger worth $18 for $6. This ain’t no gimmick robo-arms, got that?
People are expensive, may the best robot and robotic cafe win. The future of food is unlikely to be very human. Some people say food and retail experiences will never die, only transform. I guess AI and robots will help transform those experiences. As consumers, we’ll opt in for greater convenience.
Each and every choice, one beyond-meat burger at a time.
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