Introducing AVA: Revolutionizing the AgriFood Industry with SWARM Engineering

In the dynamic landscape of the agrifood industry, SWARM Engineering has made a profound impact with the unveiling of their groundbreaking virtual advisor, AVA.

Unleashing a wave of innovation in the agrifood supply chain landscape, SWARM Engineering delivers a trailblazing AI solution, to achieve multi-million-dollar savings on operational processes. At its core lies a cutting-edge Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product, with three core elements.

A CEO's Journey: An Interview with Anthony Howcroft, CEO and Founder of SWARM Engineering.

In this interview, we explore the origin story of SWARM Engineering and delve into Anthony Howcroft's path to success in the realm of technology and artificial intelligence.

Unleashing a wave of innovation in the agri-food supply chain landscape, SWARM Engineering delivers a trailblazing AI solution, to achieve multi-million-dollar savings on operational processes. At its core lies a cutting-edge Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product, with three core elements.

IRVINE, Calif., April 11, 2023 — SWARM Engineering is excited to announce the launch of its new Partner Network program to support our growing team of referral partners across the globe.  In addition, we are excited to announce Cesar Infante - a seasoned executive in the Agri-Food Sector, has joined our program.

IRVINE, Calif., March 14, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- SWARM Engineering is proud to announce AVA, the first AgriFood Virtual Advisor, an AI-powered digital assistant based on OpenAI, Microsoft Azure and SWARM technology, designed to help businesses in agri-food solve operational challenges and save millions of dollars.

New technology trends and capabilities will open up entirely new categories of solutions for SWARM. One software trend that Anthony finds most exciting is Nocode. This has the potential to place powerful algorithms for AI, machine learning (ML), and operational research in the hands of regular people without requiring them to have a math degree or years of software development experience.

Today’s food supply chain is one of the most crucial and complex industries, with many moving parts, often at risk of disruption. Many companies operate in this challenging domain and are perpetually searching for an advantage via comprehensive, scalable, and cost-effective solutions that enhance their business and propel their growth. The complexity of the food supply chain calls for a sophisticated approach, increasingly with AI and machine learning, to address the issues. Yet the skills and resources to deliver on these technologies are scarce.

The key to fostering an optimized agri-food supply chain lies in identifying, defining, and mitigating core operational challenges. The end to-end optimization of the supply chain provides all stakeholders, be it food and beverage manufacturers, producers, or shipping organizations, with an opportunity to not just reduce costs but also unlock greater efficiencies and manage potential risks. Nobody understands this better than SWARM Engineering—a Software-as-a-Service platform that leverages next-gen cognitive AI to optimize the agri-food supply chain.

SWARM Engineering was founded on the concept of what if we could solve problems instead of simply highlighting them? Anthony Howcroft, CEO of SWARM had worked in big data at Microsoft, and seen many companies getting actionable insights into their business but not fully realizing the potential to make dramatic cost savings or boost revenues. “It felt like there was another level of software maturity that companies were missing,” he told us.

SWARM Engineering was founded in Southern California, to see how a multi-agent system could take advantage of the latest AI and IoT developments to solve problems that were common in business, but hard to solve with traditional IT. Challenges like product formulation or blending can involve trillions of potential combinations, as can many common supply-chain processes like supply and demand planning, or logistics.

IRVINE, Calif., April 5, 2022--SWARM Engineering, the software-as-a-service platform that focuses on solving complex challenges in the agri-food supply chain, announced today the launch of the SWARM Challenge Modeler, a unique approach to defining and solving business challenges.

SWARM Challenge Modeler enables people to clearly define a business challenge in the agri-food supply chain and is designed to be simple enough for any businessperson to use. A library of easy-to-use templates, created by industry experts, helps business users rapidly define and understand their challenge, which can then be matched directly to an algorithmic solution in the existing SWARM solution engine.

SWARM Engineering is a creation of our times; the company combines the latest Machine Learning and Operational Research algorithms with an advanced multi-agent approach to solve complex problems in highly disruptive environments, such as a supply chain in a pandemic. Ten years ago, humanity couldn’t have solved many of the challenges we tackle today because AI research wasn’t as advanced, and most organizations lacked the necessary data to train machine learning systems.

IRVINE, Calif., Jan. 6, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, SWARM Engineering announced two additions to its distinguished Advisory Board. Vonnie Estes and Dr. Magarit Khachatryan will join the SWARM Advisory Board to provide key insights and guidance to the Board of Directors, committees of the Board, and the executive leadership.

SWARM’s CEO, Anthony Howcroft, grew up in a largely agricultural community in the center of England, where his first job was as a mainframe computer operator at Kraft Foods. Over his career, Anthony worked initially as a software engineer and then in various sales and marketing roles and is equally comfortable with art and science.

IRVINE, Calif., October 19, 2021 / -- SWARM Engineering, a next-generation, cognitive computing company and innovator in agri-food supply chain optimization, today announced it has achieved Co-Sell Ready partner status with Microsoft. This new achievement will allow Microsoft and SWARM to promote a disruptive and robust solution to tackle optimization challenges in the agri-food supply chain.

We’re pleased to share that we’ve been featured as the cover story on Analytics Insight, Big Data Analytics Companies of the Year issue! You can read an excerpt below and click through to the full digital magazine.

SWARM Engineering, a leader in food supply chain optimization, today announced its availability in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, an online store providing applications and services for use on Microsoft Azure. SWARM customers can now take advantage of the productive and trusted Azure cloud platform, with streamlined deployment and management.

Every Wednesday morning, the planners at a food supply chain company dreaded the mass of spreadsheets, emails, and post-it notes awaiting them in the office. For the next few hours, all five members of the team would huddle together to figure out the next week’s purchases and the various transportation options to match a constrained supply to the inventory demands at their U.S. distribution centers, for more than thirty separate, perishable products.