Hear me out...
After my lament on the lack of people in the food industry, we got a little off topic. There was a lot of concern about audit frequency, weight etc.
I cannot work out if this is a genius idea or terrifying... Or both!
But a lot of our factories have CCTV. Imagine if you could have an AI overlay onto what people are doing on that CCTV? The technology probably exists already or would be easy to develop to determine compliance with, say, handwashing. But imagine if it could also assess compliance to cleaning standards? Right tools used? Right chemicals? What about bringing the right items to the line etc?
I don't think as much of this is as far fetched as you may imagine. But would people want it? Would retailers want it? Legislators? Managers? Staff? Technical people?
Would you really want to know what happens when nobody is watching? In a time efficient way so that you're not trawling through hours of CCTV...? I think I would. I just worry about the ethics of it all but the ethics to the consumer would be pretty fantastic. I suppose my one real sinking feeling is I hate the idea of more policing rather than actually getting people to do the right thing because they believe in it...
But what if that meant zero external audits? Or would we get all Oceans 11 with a loop of video playing over and over...
Am I mad or a genius...?
Discuss!