Artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining wide acceptance from global seafood-harvesting operations, but its adoption among seafood processors remains low, leaving these businesses with missed opportunities to make their processes more efficient and turn greater profits.
According to London, U.K.-based nonprofit Planet Tracker, the average pre-tax earnings margin for publicly listed seafood-processing companies is 3.4 percent – far below what financial experts consider a healthy benchmark of 10 percent.
Eric Enno Tamm, the CEO and co-founder of Vancouver, Canada-based seafood software company ThisFish, said he believes there are many opportunities for seafood-processing firms to adopt AI and improve upon that low figure – but the problem has been getting companies to embrace its potential.
“There is a lack of understanding of what AI is, what it can do, and what sort of problems it can solve in seafood manufacturing,” Tamm said. “AI needs to be trained on digital data that is clean, comprehensive, and connected. Even seafood companies that have digital systems often find that their data is error-prone, patchy, and disconnected by being stored in different formats in different software. AI needs good data to be accurate and useful.”
To ensure that AI adoption rates rise, ThisFish is exploring ways to effectively implement the technology in the sector.
For example, in collaboration with a Thai tuna cannery, ThisFish used AI to study raw material variables; such as fish species, size, and harvest methods; and process variables such as cold storage duration, thawing time, and temperature; to determine their impacts on yield.
The analysis determined that the primary variables affecting yields were …
