How do you create the perfect pepperoni? What is the perfect ingredient blend for a perfume? Creme Global may just have the answer. The AI modelling innovator is helping food, agri, and cosmetic companies analyse their data to make speedy product improvements and predict customer behaviour.
Creme Global is a scientific modeling, data analytics & computing company. Founded by Cronan McNamara in 2005, the Dublin-based company has expanded to span Europe and America, boasting a staff of 30 specialists in QA, data engineering, and the food, agricultural and cosmetic sectors. Their work ranges from analysing reams of data to figure out how to create the best pepperoni, to surveying fragrance ingredients to reduce sensitivity and increase safety in ingredients used.
As with all technological developments in their early days, the first couple of iterations of generative AI left a lot to be desired.
“In the early years, AI wasn’t mature enough, or the data sets weren’t big enough or ready for AI,” Cronan explains. “Within the last five years, I feel like we’ve been in earnest integrating it properly into our platforms and products. And that’s only accelerated over the last two or three years to become even more part of our daily toolkit.”
Creme Global has been using AI for five years, but in the last two or three, it has seen a surge in the accuracy and benefit of the software.
“ChatGPT is progressing rapidly,” Cronan says. “I think [companies were] a bit sceptical because 10 or 20 years ago people were promising AI solutions and they weren’t really delivering. But all of a sudden, they are delivering.”
AI has been useful to the company both internally and externally. Internally, its use ranges from summarising meeting notes and transcription to plug-ins for coding software. AI has become invaluable in their workflow for transcribing and summarising meetings and to speed up their coding. The efficiency, Conan says, is helping his staff to create good quality work in a shorter amount of time - which in turn creates a better service for their clients.
Cronan advises that the paid version of ChatGPT - of which the current iteration is 4.0 Omni - is worth the investment, not least for its heightened security.
“I think a good way to start is to get your team some paid accounts. Your data is protected if you sign up for the enterprise account. So all of the data and information you type in and share with the ChatGPT engine becomes protected in a gated firewall area for your work only. So it’s not used to train the model.”
In terms of companies who are looking to dip their toes into AI and form a game plan, Conan has the following advice: “The challenge now is getting your ducks in a row. Organise your data and maybe supplement it with web-based data. It could be small but important things that people will do with it, and who knows where it will go from there. I can only imagine it’ll get more and more involved in different aspects of people’s businesses.”
Given the exponential rate of technological advancement in the last century, there is potential for AI to progress the world in unimaginable and life-changing ways. Any concerns that his staff may harbour are being quickly ironed out, says Cronan. With the introduction of the EU AI Act, privacy and protection around data and the use of AI will be tightly monitored. The future looks bright, and maybe the near future will yield the creation of the perfect pepperoni.
“I think companies are a bit sceptical because 10 years ago people were promising AI solutions and they weren’t delivering. But all of a sudden, they are delivering.”
– Cronan McNamara, CEO, Creme Global