Whole Foods shelves sit empty after a data breach shut down its wholesale distributor. Meat packers working for JBS Foods are paralyzed as an $11 million ransomware attack takes out their processing facilities. Some 2.2 million workers at Stop & Shop and Hannaford have their personal data exposed as the result of a cyberattack on parent company Ahold Delhaize USA.
These scenarios, straight from a William Gibson novel, are becoming increasingly common in supply chains across the world. As recently noted by Mohammed Alzuhair, a doctoral candidate in business administration at Durham University, the growing number of grocery store failures isn’t a coincidence, but the result of AI’s pernicious creep into the global food network.
In a bygone age, food went from farm and orchard straight to the general store — the only middleman being a clerk whose storefront served as an easy rallying point for consumers. Today, the supply chain is like a spider web of contractors and wholesalers, where every shipment is insured based on risk algorithms and tracked by transportation management systems.
Just as AI’s being pushed into every other facet of our lives, it’s coming for each point in the supply chain too, turning an already vulnerable system into an automated security nightmare.
Alzuhair notes that the number of businesses choosing AI automation over human-level supply management has gone through the roof in recent years.
As one study found, AI is now deeply embedded in all six stages of the UK’s food system: supply, production, processing, distribution, consumption, and waste. Farms across the world are turning to precision agriculture models powered by AI, which is said to track individual plant and animal data and all the logistics they encompass — from seed procurement to harvest, from livestock feed to the slaughterhouse.
This is all well and good if we’re only worried about productivity. But as the rise in devastating cyber-attacks makes clear, the increasing reliance on AI also has the effect of removing human judgement from the supply chain. When cyberattacks reshuffle stores’ digital records, there are increasingly few personnel who know how to right the ship. In many cases, Alzuhair writes, human supply chain managers are no longer being asked to override automatic shipments or intervene when discrepancies occur under their jurisdiction.
The result of all this may be catastrophic. Should a worst-case scenario ever occur — a cyberattack, a natural disaster, an internet outage — there may be no human workers left with the skills that once kept food on the shelves.
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