Mixing AI with ingenuity delivers a tasty recipe
July 6, 2021
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Jer Hayes and team developed an AI system that could suggest new ingredients and flavor combinations for tapas dishes.
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The democratization of technology is creating a workforce of innovators and new opportunities for talent.
Imagine a world where everyone was a technologist. Where everyone could leverage powerful technology to create solutions and innovate even without having highly specialized skills.
What if that world already exists?
Through the democratization of technology, one of the five top tech trends identified in Accenture’s Technology Vision 2021: Leaders Wanted report, powerful capabilities are being put into the hands of people across the organization. This leaves everyone feeling empowered to use and customize technology solutions at their level, without the need for highly technical skills.
This shift is creating a new world—one where technical and non-technical professionals can work together seamlessly to unlock value and accelerate innovation, as well as generate waves of opportunity for future talent.
A recipe to inspire creativity
Jeremiah Hayes, who leads computational creativity research at Accenture Labs in Dublin, talks about the opportunities of democratized technology and how a mixture of technology with human ingenuity can unlock creativity.
“At present, people are not yet able to fully utilize the IT tools available to them, so it’s important for businesses to continually consider how to make technology more usable,” he says.
As part of his research, Jeremiah harnesses the power of AI and computational creativity to support the discovery of new product ideas or enable product adaptations in an area we can all relate to: food.
His team used an AI system that could suggest new ingredients and flavor combinations for tapas dishes. Incorporating a knowledge graph—a structure that categorizes different pieces of data by the way they relate to each other (recipes, ingredients, recipe region, flavor compounds, nutrients and health benefits)—the system makes suggestions for new combinations.
Bringing the flavor with AI
In the culinary world, there is often skepticism about how technology could possibly exhibit the kind of creativity required from chefs when creating dishes. To overcome this, we invited a Michelin Star restaurant owner to taste the new flavor combinations identified by the AI system and experience first-hand how technology can be designed to work with humans to enhance creativity, not replace them.
“I’m very excited about how AI and technology in general can help people do their jobs better,” says Jeremiah.
“The ways in which democratized technology will impact career opportunities is interesting. It will mean technical upskilling for users of the technologies as well as upskilling for the developers of the technology in areas such as user experience and human interaction.”
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