How BeeOdiversity leverages 12 million bees and AI to create a more sustainable future

As AI becomes more mainstream around the world, innovation is blossoming to new levels. It seems that every day, we’re hearing about a new business or societal problem that AI can help solve.

Take environmental sustainability, for example. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Pollution and climate change affect all of us and threaten to have a lasting impact on future generations. People care deeply about protecting our planet, but many do not know what actions they can take to make a difference.

I found an empowering example of using AI and data to support sustainability in a recent episode of the Pivotal podcast. This episode features Loic van Cutsem, Director of international partnerships and development at BeeOdiversity.

This Belgium-based tech company is harnessing a 12 million-strong workforce to monitor biodiversity—the health of an ecosystem.

BeeOdiversity uses AI to interpret data on biological health

BeeOdiversity saw an opportunity to use bees as data collectors at scale. As bees search for nectar in flowers and other plants, they collect valuable information from gardens, fields, and other features in the land and air as they browse. By analyzing the pollen and other microscopic materials that the bees bring back to the hive, BeeOdiversity can get a living snapshot of the biological health of any designated area. This data can reveal factors that harm the environment and where they are located, such as invasive species, heavy metals, and pesticides.

BeeOdiversity leverages AI to interpret this data from bees and offer insights to their clients. Their recommendations do more than help companies comply with regulatory requirements. By having this information, communities and businesses can work together to improve the ecosystem that surrounds them, from increasing water quality to protecting soil health, preventing flooding, and mitigating climate change impacts. They have a better understanding of what actions to take to operate more sustainably, and an army of tiny data collectors who can continue to measure their progress.

That’s what I love about this use case—it’s AI-powered innovation that’s incredibly impactful and scalable to communities around the world. And what’s inspiring about BeeOdiversity’s story is that it holds lessons for other organizations that want to use data and AI to solve complex business problems.

Having good data is essential for driving change

Getting clean and accurate data is essential for any organization to drive change. Data provides a common basis to identify issues and discover solutions. This is especially important if you’re using AI to address a societal issue such as sustainability, which requires collaboration across multiple sectors. When there are so many stakeholders at the table, the recommendations from AI need to be powered by data that everyone can trust and accept.

Today there is no standardized data source in the field of biodiversity monitoring. But BeeOdiversity is unique in how they have recruited bees to collect data through their everyday pollinating behavior. By using bees, they are essentially standardizing the data collection, while giving nature a chance to give us feedback. For this reason, BeeOdiversity has not faced much skepticism from clients. You can’t argue with the bees.

The stakeholders are almost in awe of all this information gathered by the bees, and they’re responsive to the findings. They understand that this is what the bees are telling us. It’s the truth.

Loic van Cutsem, Director of international partnerships and development, BeeOdiversity

Democratizing access to data leads to impact at scale

Quality data is a crucial ingredient for success with AI. But at the end of the day, data is only a tool. It’s what you do with the data that matters the most. Data’s real value comes from how it empowers people to make smarter decisions, and you can maximize that impact by expanding the number of people who have access to that data.

BeeOdiversity has been building their proprietary data set for the last decade. Now, they are working to empower as many people as possible to make better sustainability decisions with that data, including businesses, governments, and soon, individuals.

They have customers from a wide range of industries, from agrifood producers to financial institutions, that are all keen on better managing their natural resources to build more resilient businesses. Governments are also working with BeeOdiversity to improve the environment for the communities they serve. For example, Knokke-Heist, a coastal city in Belgium, was able to achieve a 300% drop in pesticide levels and a four-times increase in plant diversity.  

And for maximum impact at scale, BeeOdiversity is developing a mobile app that will allow people to scan the plants in their garden and get tailored recommendations on how to improve their local ecosystem.

By democratizing access to their invaluable data, BeeOdiversity is enabling better sustainability decisions across society. This shows the power of having standardized data that everyone can rally behind.

Accelerate innovation by unlocking new insights

One of the benefits of AI is how quickly it can accelerate innovation for those who embrace it. Just point the AI to new sets of data, and it unlocks more levels of analysis and insight, allowing businesses to easily expand their coverage area or improve their processes.

BeeOdiversity is a great example. They developed a solution called BeeOimpact that incorporates satellite imagery to assess the crops and industries in a given area. It draws from this satellite data, along with data from their existing dataset that was collected by bees, and uses a predictive AI model to provide almost instantaneous estimates of the pesticides that are likely to be there.

BeeOdiversity is also developing a method to allow beekeepers to take photos of pollen, instead of manually collecting the pollen to send in for lab analysis. Their aim is to use computer vision and machine learning to identify the pollen in the photo. This new method would require less human effort and speed up their process of analyzing pollen samples.

As they develop these new capabilities, BeeOdiversity uses Microsoft Azure’s data and AI capabilities to enable their AI use cases, and GitHub as their platform for developers. With these tools, BeeOdiversity can achieve an extraordinary pace of innovation and make a sizable impact for sustainability.

Listen to the full conversation on Pivotal

By standardizing biodiversity data, empowering people to take action, and unlocking new innovation at a fast pace, BeeOdiversity is tackling sustainability head-on with the help of technology.

It’s brilliant how Loic and his team have found a way to leverage the diligence of bees with the analytical power of AI to unlock the kind of insights that many of us have dreamed about for decades. They’re giving a voice to mother nature and giving us humans a chance to take action so that we can live in greater harmony with the planet.

To hear more about BeeOdiversity and their ingenious use of AI, listen to the episode on the Pivotal podcast.