KANSAS CITY — The promise of artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool to improve the food and beverage product development process was on full display at the Institute of Food Technologists’ IFT FIRST annual meeting and expo that was held July 14-17 in Chicago. The range of exhibitors sharing new applications using AI offered a glimpse of the progress that will come in the years ahead.

Exhibitor AI Palette, for example, demonstrated how its product spots emerging trends across 62 billion data points and identifies consumer motivations that may be used to create and validate product and marketing concepts. BCD iLabs showcased its AI software platform that helps accelerate product development cycles and reduces the number of experiments required for successful bench-scale projects, according to the company.

Several other exhibitors showed how their systems accelerate the insights development portion of product development, and others utilize “smart” sensors that employ AI to identify potential problems in product development and processing.

During a keynote presentation at IFT FIRST, Nora Khaldi, chief executive officer of Nuritas, described how her company is using AI to develop new ingredients. She noted that in the past the development of new ingredients that are cost-effective, taste neutral and are healthy was expensive and could take decades.

She said with AI, the process from development and commercialization of the ingredient, along with clinical studies and regulatory requirements, may be completed in as little as two years. Using AI, Nuritas was able to launch PeptiStrong, which is a peptide designed to promote muscle health.

“We use it (AI) to discover new ingredients for the food space in a fraction of the time,” Khaldi said.

The broad swath of AI applications exhibited and discussed at IFT FIRST this year illustrates the profound impact it will have on product development. Some of the industry’s largest companies are embracing the technologies. For example, General Mills, Inc. is using AI to run models that are helping to guide the company’s innovation process, and AI is being used to connect operations across customer orders, the supply chain and inventory levels to ensure the company has the right product in the right place at the right time. The Campbell Soup Co. has been following a similar path, tracking and curating billions of data points to identify insights and leverage agile design methodology to accelerate the development of new products that resonate with consumers.

Yet for all the excitement around the AI applications available today, it must be emphasized that the technology is still in its nascent phase. This period harkens back to the late 1990s, when most consumers and businesses were able to access the internet, explore its functionality and begin to understand the profound impact it would have on society.

Like the internet, AI’s initial benefits will be in accelerating planning, processing and execution; it will help reduce some of the friction that exists throughout the product development process. AI in the years ahead will echo the ways the internet revolutionized communication, information access and transformed how most businesses operate.

Think about the internet of today versus 1999. That leap forward in the next 25 years with AI may be just as significant and consequential as the past quarter century.