Speaker: See AI as an opportunity

• Published date: 20 September 2023
• Publication title: Stratford Press

To make that even harder, they also have to deal with Generation Z, a group of youngsters born in the late 1990s who have never known life without the internet

Helping guide them in the right direction is Michael McQueen, an Australian trend forecaster and bestselling author who was a speaker at the Red Meat Sector Conference in Auckland.

“You tend to hear about the future spoken in really glowing terms like it’s all just opportunity or it’s all just really scary and neither of those is correct.

“The reality is the future is just going to be very different and we all know that the pace of change has never been as fast and it will never be slow again.

“Those sorts of sentiments we are familiar with, but I think there’s some really exciting stuff ahead for the industry, but also some challenges that will need to be confronted.”

McQueen said artificial intelligence could help the industry be far more productive and streamlined, and it was helping Australasian producers who were finding it difficult to get staff.

United States company Tyson Foods had spent $1.3 billion upgrading the use of technology in their factories and processing facilities because they were struggling to get staff.

AI was not about taking jobs away from the industry, but about getting better, he said.

It was possible now to take a video on an iPhone of a worker doing repetitive tasks with AI analysing the movements and body parts most at risk of repetitive strain injuries.

Some companies had seen worker compensation costs reduced by 30 per cent by using these tools to identify risk areas.

Exoskeletons were being used in Australia as wearable structures to support and protect bodies during heavy work.

Generative AI and ChatGPT were having an impact on the back-end administration.

McQueen said he could see advances extending to the farm.

“It depends on the types of farms, but I’ve done a lot of work, particularly in Australia with some cropping farmers who are using a lot of technology and robotics, and in fact, there is carbon robotics which produce essentially these big robots for identifying weeds using AI and actually zap the weeds rather than using any herbicides on the land, so it doesn’t disturb the soil or add any herbicides, it just literally moves across the weeds like a driverless car 24/7 scanning, identifying weeds and zapping them with lasers.”

He said the expensive technology could be expected to become less prohibitive with greater uptake and was a “phenomenal” step forward...