Beer, Bots, Broadcasts: Companies Using AI in the Cloud
Back in October, Deschutes Brewery Inc.’s Brian Faivre was fermenting a batch of Obsidian Stout in a massive tank. Something was amiss; the beer wasn’t fermenting at the usual temperature. Luckily, a software system triggered a warning and he fixed the problem.
"We would have had to dump an entire batch," the brewmaster said. When beer is your bottom line, that's a calamity.
The software that spotted the temperature anomaly is from Microsoft Corp. and it's a new type that uses a powerful form of artificial intelligence called machine learning. What makes it potentially revolutionary is that Deschutes rented the tool over the internet from Microsoft's cloud-computing service.
Day to day, Deschutes uses the system to decide when to stop one part of the brewing process and begin another, saving time while producing better beer, the company says.
The Bend, Oregon-based brewer is among a growing number of enterprises using new combinations of AI tools and cloud services from Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google. C-SPAN is using Amazon image-recognition to automatically identify who is in the government TV programs it broadcasts. Insurance company USAA is planning to use similar technology from Google to assess damage from car accidents and floods without sending in human insurance adjusters. The American Heart Association is using Amazon voice recognition to power a chat bot registering people for a charity walk in June.
AI software used to require thousands of processors and lots of power, so only the largest technology companies and research universities could afford to use it. An early Google system cost more than $1 million and used about 1,000 computers. Deschutes has no time for such technical feats. It invests mostly in brewing tanks, not data centers. Only when Microsoft, Amazon and Google began offering AI software over the internet in recent years did these ideas seem plausible.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-06/beer-bots-and-broadcasts-companies-start-using-ai-in-the-cloud
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