Leaders working on food-system applications of Artificial Intelligence say the past year has brought rapid change across the value chain, though they differ on how quickly the technology will mature in specific use cases. Speaking at the F&A Next Summit in Wageningen, the Netherlands, executives from Tastewise, AuditQ, and Turing Labs described a market where capabilities are advancing fast, while deployment still varies sharply by function.
Tastewise CEO Alon Chen said organizations are moving faster than he has ever seen, and he described the company’s shift from a consumer data platform into a broader insights solution and then into generative Artificial Intelligence. The New York-based company embraced generative Artificial Intelligence in 2023 and over the past year has focused on deploying customized Artificial Intelligence agents to help clients make more informed strategic decisions. Chen said the company’s value proposition as an agentic Artificial Intelligence partner has strengthened even within the last quarter. “There are very concrete and immediate opportunities to deliver returns,” he said. “This was really not a viable business model four months ago.”
Other parts of the food value chain appear to be developing more gradually. Yelco Gonzalez of Belgian compliance platform AuditQ said he founded the company around a year ago as an Artificial Intelligence-first business, and the six-person team is already “doing what maybe before would take a team of 15 people.” Even so, he said it could take another year or two for Artificial Intelligence to reach its full potential in food safety audits and compliance. Miriam Ueberall, Europe strategy head for Turing Labs, said adoption in food research and development remains limited and uneven, despite strong pressure on R&D teams and a clear efficiency case for Artificial Intelligence.
Executives on the panel stressed that human oversight will remain essential even as tools improve. Ueberall said many R&D teams have not historically been trained to think like data scientists, though that is beginning to change. She also said domain expertise will remain central rather than being replaced. “Human expertise still takes the ultimate call, and that is absolutely essential.” Gonzalez echoed that view, arguing that the speed of technological change makes it important to keep a “human in the loop.” The group agreed that the competitive landscape will look very different 12 months from now, with agility and speed becoming increasingly important.
