Wine Revolution with AI (maybe…)

Disclaimer: Part of this post was produced with the help of chatGPT 1o, finding sources and links to use cases faster than I had been able to do. Everything was then passed to my control, as in this version chatGPT can only see data up to 2023. So I had to add something myself; in addition, many were repetitive links, or not very relevant to the topic: here too I had to check and correct. I would say that AI, in this case, helped me to decrease the time spent on the mechanical writing of the post, leaving me time for checking data and sources and, in general, for the more creative part. I think this is the best use that can be made of an AI so far, that is, to have the routine work done, check it and verify that there are no trivialities or worse still, glaring errors.

Artificial Intelligence is used in many industries and the wine one is no exception. Integrating AI into wine marketing strategies, supply chain logistics, customer service, enables producers, distributors and retailers to improve customer experience, optimizing operations and increase sales. With this post, I’m going to begin a series dedicated specifically to the use of AI in wine marketing.

First I’ve to explain what Generative AI is, because is slightly different than AI. When we read or listen the words Generative AI, it means the AI used to create something like text, images, videos, music, or software. AI, of course, can be used also for other purposes, like analysis of a huge amount of data and discover correlations among different data stream. The well known chatGPT, LAMA, Copilot, and others, are mainly LLM, Large Language Model. They’re right what this name says: a model to create sentences with a logical sense. When you ask your question to one of that LLM, the AI analyze your sentence and give you the answer. Not ever this answer is right, many time the AI ‘invents’ its answer with wrong news or non-existing at all. We say that AI has ‘hallucinations’. The important thing, here, is that all these chat bot aren’t AI, they are only an interface to real AI, that rest in background. Better is the way these bots understand you, better will be the AI’s answer.

We have to consider these chat bot like the guy you meet one day a week in your near supermarket. You can talk with him/her about trivialities, the weather, the last match of football or other. When you start to know better one each other, then you can talk about sons, parents, or other personal things.

With AI is the same. You have to educate it to know you.

Said that, there’re 5 areas to use AI optimizing processes; of course, this does not only apply to the wine industry:

1. Consumers and personalization in wine marketing (Machine Learning)
2. Predictive analysis (Machine Learning)
3. Content creation and engagement (Generative AI)
4. Supply chain optimization (Machine Learning)
5. Customer service improvement (LLM)

1. Consumers and personalization in wine marketing

Personalization is a critical factor in modern marketing and AI can be of great help. Indeed, by analysing consumer purchase data, information on individual preferences and behaviour patterns can be extracted.

Use case: Vivino

Vivino uses AI to improve its internal search engine and suggestions of new wines for purchase. By analysing user reviews, ratings and preferences, Vivino’s AI algorithms suggest wines tailored to individual tastes. This customized approach not only improves user satisfaction, but also drives sales by connecting consumers to the wines they are most likely to like. It uses machine learning to continuously refine its recommendations based on user interactions.

Vivino: Choose Your Next Great Wine With Big Data And Artificial Intelligence

2. Predictive analysis

Predictive analytics involves using historical data to make predictions about future trends. In wine marketing, artificial intelligence can predict consumer trends, demand fluctuations and market dynamics by quickly analysing time series and comparing them to many more markets. In this case, forecasts are improved as AI can read the comments customers write in wine blog and marketplaces. The LLMs are specialized just to do this kink of job.

3. Content creation and engagement

Creating engaging content is essential for wine marketing. Artificial intelligence tools can help generate content that resonates with the audience and stimulates engagement. As in other cases (and at the end of this post I’m going to get you some examples), but mainly in this one, a human control is strictly need. The risk is that AI propose wrong contents and link to not relevant web pages, so your customers may lose confidence in this contents.

4. Optimising the supply chain

Efficient supply chain management is crucial for the wine industry (like every other ones), given its dependence on seasonal production and global distribution. Artificial intelligence can optimise supply chain operations by improving logistics, tracking shipments and managing inventory. You can find some interesting articles about this topics, Logistic and AI, but not for wine or beverage. Here you can read something interesting.

5. Improving Customer Service

Chatbots and virtual assistants based on artificial intelligence are becoming increasingly common in customer service. These tools can handle requests, provide recommendations and assist in order processing. By harnessing the capabilities of the LLM system, AI can better understand what the customer writes and provide more targeted responses and, above all, chat bots can answer 24/24 and 7/7.

Conclusions

Artificial Intelligence is a large intellectual concept. It can rapidly find correlations between data, clustering and display them with some other interesting point of view. But it has to be educated in the arguments where you want to use it. If you hiring a mathematician that doesn’t know your working area, their knowledge won’t serve you. And educating an AI in a specific topics needs time, as you hired a new employee. And just like in that case, you must have a look at his work until he/she has learnt. So, if you are a winemaker, put attention in using AI.

I told you I would explain the corrections I made to this post. Well, except for #1, AI (I’ve used chatGPT 1o and check the result with Copilot) got me only wrong link for use cases, pointing to pages without correlation with this topics or a generic one. When I told it that it gave me a wrong link, it apologized and said me that actually there’re no so many articles about this argument, like wine marketplaces and AI; in case of #3, chatGPT gave me a link to Domaine Romanée-Conti saying me that at the Domain they use AI to generate post for their blog. But a DRC’s blog doesn’t exist.