Education, employment and research will lead the growth of the poultry sector

All photos and graphs are provided by Dr Vincent Guyonnet.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

The common thread for the future of the poultry sector is how it will manage its digital transition and embrace the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The field of AI started in 1956 with the idea of developing a fully intelligent machine behaving like the human brain. But since the learning process is an important component of Intelligence, the scientific field of AI has been described as the field attempting to reproduce the characteristics of the brain of a child.

This definition means that AI is attempting to create machines able to learn from experiences and transfer the knowledge acquired in one area to another area. The term AI is broadly used for a wide range of applications, like artificial vision, speech recognition or natural language processing.

A very important field of AI is Machine Learning and its ability to obtain insights from a vast amount of data. Machine Learning models are divided into Supervised Learning (we must provide a vast number of training data with input parameters linked to a defined outcome) and Unsupervised Learning (model identifying some trends and pattern from data provided, without any instructions provided to the system).

Supervised Learning has been used to train models to visually recognize dead birds or floor-egg laying behavior in breeder birds and to predict the weight of broilers up to 10 days in advance.

While the poultry sector is extremely rich in data, it is too often collected manually and recorded on paper forms. The key challenge for the poultry sector will be to have sufficient digital data available to train algorithms and develop new AI models.

Therefore, the digital transformation of the sector is the first step, greatly facilitated by the availability of many sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) devices recording automatically information such as bird weight, feed and water consumption, house temperature and relative humidity. Welcome to Poultry 4.0!

Education

People learn in many ways: some like to read, some like to watch tutorials, while others prefer to discover on their own.

The success of an application like Duolingo is its ability to tailor the lectures to the needs and likes of its users. The AI-driven technology allows to design exercises to focus on mistakes frequently made by individual users, truly offering a smart customization of the educational offering.

Many professional educators have already embraced AI and are using AI-derived tools for teaching purposes, with countless books published on the topic, many tutorials, and tips on the best way to use AI in the classroom.

The fast pace of research and new product development is making continuing education an ‘absolute Must’ for the future of the poultry sector.

We must know about the best practices and tools available. For instance, the World Veterinary Education in Production (WVEPAH), a non-profit organization, is providing continuing education for veterinarians and poultry specialists around the world in partnership with the World Organization for Animal Health and the University of Montreal in Canada.

Two courses on broilers and waterfowl are planned during the second half of 2026.

Good communication will also be critical to the future of the poultry sector. The sector is made up of trained scientists and technical people, strongly believing in science and often bringing scientific arguments into debates with governments, retailers, civil society and consumers. But the debates are often not about science. They are about emotion.

The poultry sector must learn new communication skills and become as savvy as animal welfare activists in the art of communicating, especially with younger generations of consumers.

Employment

What are the opportunities to attract young talents to the poultry sector? While the sector is still very labor-intensive, it has become extremely difficult to recruit farm workers in many countries. Our sector is in need for more automation and digitalization to ensure its sustainable growth.

For example, we are still weighing birds manually, meaning a relatively low frequency of obtaining that information, some stressful time for the birds and even some possible risks of injury and also meaning many possibilities of errors through human intervention. Smart automated weighing systems allow an accurate recording of daily weight of birds and flock uniformity, allowing for a better-informed style of managing flocks.

The poultry sector must use AI applications designed to augment our ability to perform our jobs. For example, artificial vision systems will assist us in the examination and grading of chicken carcasses or eggs, allowing us to increase both accuracy and efficiency of processing.

Future applications of AI will be about Collaborative Intelligence where machines augment human capacities rather than replace them and people will be working alongside machines. It is however fair to state that while AI will not really replace workers, workers using AI will replace workers that do not.

Research

AI and its various applications in the poultry sector will become a major focus of research. Just like biotechnology in the early 1990s and animal welfare in the 2000s became common disciplines in Poultry Science departments, AI is now a favorite topic of research with work reported not only in journals dedicated to AI research in agriculture but also in traditional poultry science journals.

For instance, in 2025, 19 papers listing either Neural Network or Deep Learning or Machine Learning as key words were published in Poultry Science and already 9 were published in 2026.

AI can help us to identify trends, patterns in vast repository of data and allow us to ‘see what we cannot see’. Through Machine Learning, we can search a vast amount of database and identify new opportunities for the poultry sector.

As younger generations of consumers are willing to change their food purchasing habits to help reduce their impact on the environment, environmental sustainability must be a key driver of research and development. The poultry sector represents only 8.4% of the total emissions of the livestock sector (for a total of 600 million tons of CO2 equivalent), mostly from 2 sources: feeds and manure.

There is an urgent need to promote the research and development of new products and tools that will help the poultry sector address its most pressing challenges: the rise of antimicrobial resistance and its devastating on people and animals, the importance of gut health for optimum productivity of poultry production and the impact of production on our planet and its limited resources.

For instance, innovative companies like Insighter from China are focusing their research on gut health, directly addressing these 3 main challenges: better bird health and welfare, better feed efficiency and productivity and therefore also a lower CO2 footprint of the poultry sector on our planet.

They have adopted the latest computer models and AI tools to both identify the best potential candidates for clinical studies and to accelerate the time needed to register and sell new molecules. They were able to bring rapidly to market a new natural solution with anticoccidial and growth promoting effects, Gutmyria, likely the first new anticoccidial product since the late 1990s.

AI will accelerate the identification and development of future products and will further contribute to the sustainable development of the poultry sector.

Guiding the future of the poultry sector

Many years ago, some leaders within the poultry sector took a leap of faith when researching and adopting new housing systems, new feed ingredients or formulation, and innovative vaccine technologies. Research and innovation have been the key to the current success of the poultry sector.

Global leaders will emerge to guide us through this new digital world and will help the poultry sector maximize the potential of AI.