Robo-Beer: World's First Beer Brewed by Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is disrupting everything from board games to the betting industry—but how about one of the world's oldest beverages?

London-based IntelligentX is the world's first firm to brew beer with the help of artificial intelligence. The startup is using an algorithm called Automated Brewing Intelligence (ABI) to collect customer feedback data through a Facebook Messenger bot in order to improve the recipes of its beer.

"Over the last six months we've iterated the algorithm and improving the algorithm and improving the beers," Hew Leith, co-founder of IntelligentX, tells Newsweek.

Four beers have been created to date—Golden AI, Amber AI, Pale AI and Black AI—all of which are brewed along the Bermondsey Beer Mile in London.

"We're doing something exciting," says IntelligentX co-founder Rob McInerney, who recently completed a PhD in machine learning at Oxford University. "We do think [about] the future, and actually what AI is really allowing us to do here is have conversations with all our customers and actually allow their feedback to not just determine what adverts we show them, but really what the product they're actually getting is."

Less than a week since launching, the company has already sold out and is busy working on the next batch. The hope is that each batch of beer will be better than the last, with the ABI algorithm's ultimate aim being to win a major beer competition.

And beer is just the start, according to Leith, who believes many other products can be improved using machine learning in this way, such as chocolate or perfume.

He says: "Anything that's got an emotive element where people have strong feelings about what it should be, we could really infuse it with artificial intelligence to make it a better product."