ORLANDO, FLA. — The opportunity that artificial intelligence (AI) presents the commercial baking industry appears to be unlimited, once the technology is more refined and readily available. But adoption is coming quickly. 

“It’s going to be a revolution in the baking industry,” said Gerald Holt, senior director of global power and automation, Grupo Bimbo, Mexico City, during a discussion on AI at the American Bakers Association (ABA) Convention, held March 22-26 in Orlando Fla.

Holt and Oliver Haya, business manager, Rockwell Automation, discussed with Eric Dell, ABA president and chief executive officer, how bakeries can plan and implement AI in their facilities today and into the future. According to an ABA survey from March 2024 of both supplier and baker companies, 70% plan to implement some form of AI in the next 12 months. 

Currently, Haya noted that the three main opportunities for AI in bakeries fall into process and production optimization, predictive maintenance, and quality and inspection. For quality inspection, Haya said that AI allows baking companies to digitize a previously time-consuming manual process. 

“AI is really good at taking a picture of a finished product and looking at it the way a human would and evaluating if it looks right,” he said. 

In order for AI to be useful in any of these functions, however, it has to have a robust and clean data set from which to learn from. 

“When we think about yield optimization, for example, we not only need data about what the outcome was, but we also need to know about all the inputs,” Haya said. “How closely was the recipe followed? What was the quality of the ingredients coming in from batch to batch?”

One of AI’s limits, he continued, is that it can’t think beyond the data set it’s given: “One of the tricky parts is that unconstrained AI might give results you don’t want. It may decide that the most energy efficient way to make bread is to make a thousand-pound loaf, and that’s not going to sell on the shelf.” 

With the amount of data needed to execute an accurate and helpful AI, cybersecurity is of the utmost importance. And when introducing AI to employees as a part of the process, it’s important to be sensitive to misconceptions they might have of the technology. 

“If you’re in a bakery and you tell employees you’re going to implement AI, I imagine a lot of them are going to be frightened by it,” Holt said. “Good change management means that it needs to be gradual and it need to engage the associates to take the fear away.” 

When asked about misconceptions around AI, Holt and Haya urged the bakers to get more specific about what they want the technology to do for them: What problem are they trying to solve? 

“People think AI is a monolith, and we don’t have artificial general intelligence yet,” Haya explained. “We have a bunch of small things that are doing one thing, and you can put a lot of those together to do something more powerful.” 

Holt added: “There’s some hype about AI fixing everything, and it will do it eventually, but set your expectations on what you want to get out of it right now.”