What sort of thing is AI?
Artificial intelligence, or AI, is not just a new technology. It’s more of a force: one that will change the way we live, work, communicate, learn and even think.
If, like me, you’re old enough to remember when you first got a modem in your home so you could access the Internet, or not much longer after that, got your first mobile phone, you’ll recognise just how transformational those technologies were. They embedded themselves in every aspect of our lives and changed them permanently.
AI’s power is of the same order of magnitude. The Internet made everyday challenges easier to deal with, and the ordinary, pre-smartphone mobile dramatically improved our ability to communicate, and had a huge effect on spontaneity and day-to-day life.
But AI’s power is less intuitively obvious. It’s more of a mystery. And it doesn’t help that some of its top practitioners and architects disagree about its risks and benefits.
AI is the ability of machines to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence.
What is AI anyway? AI is the ability of machines to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as understanding language, recognising images, helping to make and explain decisions, and learning from data. A more recent development called ‘generative AI’ can produce coherent text, translate, edit and summarise, and produce images and videos from human prompts. And it’s getting better every day, building upon itself, evolving at an exponential rate.
AI is already transforming many industries and sectors, from healthcare to education, from energy to finance, from agriculture to manufacturing. It is introducing efficiency, convenience, precision, consistency, reliability... and all at greater speed and lower cost.
But what might AI do for wine? And how might it impact Society members?
AI from grape to glass
The entire wine production and consumption journey will likely be affected by AI. From grape cultivation, where precision agriculture can monitor soil and climate conditions and predict ideal times for harvesting, to vineyard management, to stronger sustainability, to blending and fermentation, to bottling – the whole process of production can be transformed. Afterwards, distribution and retail can benefit from AI robotics in labelling and packaging, quality control using AI vision, and in retail, the impact is multi-dimensional and all-encompassing.
The Wine Society, now processing over 900,000 cases a year from around 180,000 active members, is now a hugely complex organisation, operating and competing in a market that is increasingly demanding, sophisticated and harder to predict.
Imagine how much more resilient and nimble we will become when we are able to apply predictive analytics to market behaviours. This could help to create dynamic forecasts, or analyse and rearrange the way we look at demand by breaking it down into every imaginable segment, from demographic characteristics, to the specifics of wine, from region to grape to price point.
Some AI is already being woven into Society activity right now.
Some AI is already being woven into Society activity right now: route optimisation using real-time traffic data and weather conditions is becoming a standard feature in distribution and delivery. In bottle-picking, combining AI and robotics produces a much more efficient picking and packing process, minimising error. Both lead to higher levels of member satisfaction.
But what about the member’s perspective? The key concept is personalisation. Every member’s tastes and circumstances are unique. We’re all on different parts of our wine journey. AI can deepen the Society’s understanding of its members, and provide us with recommendations that reflect our individual preferences and subtle patterns in our buying history. AI-powered chatbots are also improving every day, capable of answering increasingly nuanced questions, with answers that help us explore in the way that best suits our tastes and pockets. None of this replaces humans directly of course – it complements and supports humans to complete normally repetitive or unexciting tasks. It frees humans up to give a personal touch – the one we all value as members and customers.
Just as today’s Society would be almost unrecognisable to our Victorian founders, tomorrow’s AI-powered Society may be hard to recognise for us. At its heart, though, is the same organisation with the same values and the same passion for great wine and happy members.
But like so many things in modern life, moving with the times is the same as standing still. We need to anticipate the times, be creative and take risks. Should we ask AI to do that for us, or shall we be creative without it?
>> Read about the future of wine
Explore our Generation Series wines
We tasked some of our favourite producers to craft wines especially for our members. These unmissable and delicious wines showcase the creativity and skill of our growers.
