Illustration: Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Getty Images
Whole Foods shelves remain empty after a data breach shut down the wholesaler. Meat packers working at JBS Foods have been paralyzed after an $11 million ransomware attack destroyed their processing facility. Approximately 2.2 million Stop & Shop and Hannaford employees had their personal data exposed as a result of a cyberattack on their parent company, Ahold Delhaize USA.
These scenarios, taken straight from a William Gibson novel, are becoming increasingly common in supply chains around the world. As Mohamed Alzuhair, a doctoral candidate in business administration at Durham University, recently pointed out, the rise in grocery store bankruptcies is no coincidence, but a detrimental result of AI’s infiltration of the global food network.
In times gone by, food was delivered directly from farms and orchards to general stores. The only intermediary was the store clerk, whose storefront served as a gathering place for consumers. Today, the supply chain is a web of contractors and wholesalers, with every shipment insured based on risk algorithms and tracked by a transportation management system.
Just as AI is being introduced into every aspect of our lives, it will also be introduced at each point in the supply chain, turning already vulnerable systems into automated security nightmares.
Alzuhair points out that the number of companies choosing AI automation over human-level supply management has surged in recent years.
Research shows that AI is now deeply integrated into all six stages of the UK food system: supply, production, processing, distribution, consumption and waste. Farms around the world are said to be turning to AI-powered precision farming models to track individual plant and animal data and all the logistics involved, from seed sourcing to harvest, livestock feed to slaughterhouse.
If all you care about is productivity, this is fine. However, as the rise in catastrophic cyber-attacks makes clear, increased reliance on AI also has the effect of removing human judgment from supply chains. When a cyberattack rewrites a store’s digital records, fewer and fewer staff members know how to rectify the situation. Alshair wrote that in many cases, human supply chain managers are no longer required to disable automated shipments or intervene when conflicts arise under their jurisdiction.
The consequences of all this can be devastating. If a worst-case scenario occurs, such as a cyberattack, natural disaster, or internet outage, you could be left without the skilled workers who once kept food on the shelves.
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