Microsoft, together with Fourkind, a Finnish technology consultancy that specializes in strategic spearhead projects with expertise in artificial intelligence, and Mackmyra, an award-winning Swedish whisky distillery, are creating the world’s first whisky developed with artificial intelligence (AI).

Any Master Blender will tell you: the possibilities for different whiskies are endless. This is where the 20-year old Mackmyra distillery proposes using AI to augment the process.

"We always strive to challenge the traditions in the very traditional whisky trade and that’s something we really do now when we develop a whisky with the help of AI. We see AI as a part of our digital development, it is really exciting to let AI be a complement to the craft of producing a high-quality whisky. For me as a Master Blender it is a great achievement to be able to say that I'm now also a mentor for the first ever created AI whisky in the world" says Angela D’Orazio from Mackmyra.

Angela D'Orazio, Mackymyra's Master Blender (Image credit - Mackmyra)

This is the first time that AI has been used to augment and automate the time-consuming process of whisky creation. The distillery’s machine learning models, powered by Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform and AI cognitive services, are fed with Mackmyra’s existing recipes (including those for award-winning blends), sales data, and customer preferences. With this dataset the AI can generate more than 70 million recipes that it predicts will be popular and of the highest quality.

So is D'Orazio worried that she might lose her job? Not at all - the AI solution is not designed to replace a Master Blender. The idea is for the whisky to be generated by AI and still be curated by a person. It will speed up the process and, thanks to the algorithm’s ability to sift through and calculate a vast amount of data, it is likely to find new and innovative combinations that would otherwise never have been considered.

Says Jarno Kartela, Machine Learning Partner at Fourkind: “Algorithms don't have senses so we need another take on how to understand something so complex as whisky. Although lacking human expertise, we can teach machines to understand what elements previous recipes and products are made of and how they are perceived and ranked by customers and experts. With this as a raw data asset, we can leverage a combination of explorative algorithms to generate endless new recipes and products and then use a set of discriminative algorithms to understand which of them might be great, repeating until better recipes are not found. This requires a lot from the computation side, as we need millions of iterations while keeping track of what worked and what did not before reaching a solid guess of a good new whisky." Phew. We might have to pause for a dram here as we gather our thoughts.

Image credit - Fourkind

Mackmyra's AI-generated whisky will be available from Autumn 2019.

Mackmyra is a Nordic whisky making pioneer that kickstarted the Swedish whisky journey in 1999. Its whisky is created with Swedish raw materials, without additives, and using environmentally-friendly distillation technology. Mackmyra's share is traded on the Nasdaq First North Stockholm exchange.

Image credit - Mackmyra Distillery

Fourkind is a consulting agency mixing management consulting and the implementation capabilities of creative technology companies. The company has grown to 30 consultants in a little over a year, and has been profitable since it's second month. Fourkind currently has teams in Helsinki and Amsterdam, and multiple high-profile clients at both sites.

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.