Beck's Brewery has brought a fully AI-generated beer called “Autonomous” to market. Recipe, brewing process, design, packaging, marketing: Artificial intelligence created it all. A real marketing coup?
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 He's one of the very few people so far to try Beck's Autonomous.
00:05 So, what does he make of it?
00:10 Very good.
00:12 This time it wasn't brewmaster Andreas Grond who developed the recipe,
00:16 but the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, fed with information from the internet.
00:22 What you find online are recipes from amateur brewers.
00:26 In a professional brewery, we operate in a different league,
00:30 but we're always looking for ideas of what amateur brewers are doing.
00:34 And these ideas have led us to play with other types of hops that we've never used before.
00:40 Beck's a 150-year-old traditional brewery suddenly at the mercy of AI?
00:54 Hundreds of thousands of bottles roll off the production line every day, in all kinds of varieties.
00:59 Because Beck's now belongs to AB InBev, the world's largest brewing company,
01:05 and they're keen to stay current.
01:07 Not only did the recipe come from ChatGPT, but also the name Autonomous and the design of the can.
01:13 I love it. I think the green comes out really well.
01:16 I love how AI also put in the little hop leaves.
01:21 [Laughter]
01:23 AI chose...
01:25 We leveraged the power of technology and AI to do something that was very groundbreaking,
01:31 as this, that you can see, and that was really relevant for our consumers.
01:34 So yes, this design was done leveraging the power of AI.
01:37 We were very much overwhelmed by the positive reaction of the consumers and also of the public.
01:44 We had 190 newspaper articles being published throughout Europe about Beck's Autonomous,
01:50 and we reached 17 million people within the first few weeks.
01:54 Another AI was less enthralled.
01:58 Bing Chat was asked by tech news service Heise to judge the not-yet-released beer.
02:04 My conclusion? Beck's Autonomous is a joke.
02:08 It's beer for people who don't have a clue about beer and want to be told by a machine what to drink.
02:14 It's beer for people who've lost all respect for the tradition and craft of brewing.
02:19 When you do something new, it's always going to come under debate, right?
02:26 And I do think that being the first to really scale and work with artificial intelligence in brewing has created that debate.
02:34 I think that there are many trends in the food and drink industry, with AI being such a hot topic,
02:41 that it's maybe going to encourage those comments.
02:44 But the thing that we kept on coming back to is that it has real consumer relevance.
02:48 Like, these platforms are at scale.
02:50 Real people still work for Beck's.
02:53 Aren't you worried about your job?
02:55 No, because the recipes we find online are from hobby brewers.
03:01 We have our own recipe manual for brewing Beck's, 50 pages.
03:04 We haven't published it online, nor have our competitors.
03:08 So I'm not worried about my descendants.
03:11 Beck's will only give out 450 cans of Autonomous to competition winners.
03:19 If they're as thrilled with the result as Andreas Grönders, more AI beer might be available in the future.
03:26 [MUSIC PLAYING]