From fashion designers to rice growers, artificial intelligence can help

Lingga Madu dreams that one day his company will design and sell fashionable clothes at a price everyone can afford. Born of past experience, it is a business vision very much focused on embracing the future. Having grown up in Jogja – where the average daily wage of US$3 means it ranks as one of Indonesia's poorest cities – the 32-year-old software engineer recalled how the latest fashions were beyond the reach of most people. That memory stayed with him and in 2014 Madu founded Sale Stock, a Jakarta-based e-commerce company where the guiding principle is to make more by charging less. A moneymaking marriage between fashion design and artificial intelligence (AI) allowing the latest AI technology to mine and analyse market data and customer behaviour to a level beyond human capability, thereby identifying designs that will sell and tailoring production accordingly.