If the wave of new technologies in the food industry make you feel like a lion searching for courage, you're not alone. "The food industry is kind of technology averse," Dr. David Acheson, CEO of The Acheson Group, told Quality Assurance & Food Safety magazine in December 2020. "They don't embrace new technology." But leveraging these tools, such as using blockchain for tracebacks or Internet of Things (IoT) devices to monitor a facility in real time, can have implications for several parts of the food industry. It's also important to understand that tech isn't coming to replace you or all of your processes.

A few decades back, it would have been impossible to imagine the way we communicate, interact or transact on social and economic fronts today. Similarly, today it's very hard to fathom the real potential of'blockchain', despite the promises it has. Blockchain today is still in its infancy, and its mainstream value is yet to be realized. While, it's for sure that blockchain will disrupt the existing solutions, not only in industry and commerce but in almost all aspects of our day-to-day lives, but it cannot do so just by itself. Same holds true for Internet of Things (IoT) as well as for Artificial Intelligence (AI), though in different perspectives and magnitudes.

The next wave of machine intelligence, Swarm Learning, is uncovering value in data like never before to solve some of the world's most significant challenges. Hear this explained in a way for all to understand. Today, machines are trained at the core with prediction and action happening at the edge. Yet, with so much data lost, due to privacy, regulations, or sheer size, getting accurate predictions is elusive. But what if we could remove these barriers with AI, IoT and blockchain to train machines at the edge, where the data source lives.

We hear a lot about how emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are disrupting the future of work, but very often this is a high-level narrative that doesn't dive into specifics in terms of the enterprise business functions being most impacted. In this article, we'll look specifically at the procurement function to examine how and where business processes are being transformed – and even disrupted – and some of the most impactful technologies involved. These include AI/ML, predictive analytics, blockchain and IoT, as well as AR/VR and intelligent agents. While procurement might be one of the last places you'd expect to find digital transformation, the fact is that it's well underway and a sizable organisational opportunity for unlocking cost savings and operational efficiencies. By way of example, the Ariba Network supports over 3.4 million companies in over 190 countries and conducts over $2.1 trillion in commerce annually.