It’s a really, really weird thing.

When friends and colleagues from Singapore to San Francisco to Lima send you messages and tweets, that is, that show a video of your face on their various screens at home.

It’s more than a little GAH! But that’s what’s been happening since the second season of a Netflix series called Rotten has been making the rounds.***

Rotten is all about our food (and wine) supply chain. The episode my friends were watching is called “Reign of Terroir,” and it’s primarily about the Comité Régional d’Action Viticole, or CRAV, the group of militant producers in the south of France who protest radically against economic forces (such as cheap imported wine) that they believe erode their way of life.

CRAV was one of the topics that I was invited to speak to, during filming last December in New York at Paul Grieco’s Terroir wine bar. Here’s my original Instagram post, before I was permitted to speak publicly about details of the series.

Am I any sort of expert in CRAV?

Hardly.

Does the episode have anything to do with data, or Enolytics?

Nope.

I’m writing about Rotten this week because of what happened during filming: CRAV was only one part of what I was asked. I was also asked about topics like why I love wine (I’m pretty sure that’s when I started to giggle), and why I wouldn’t underestimate the Chinese consumer, and why some parts of my writing have to do with social issues like labor and immigration.

In other words, there was a lot more going on than what anyone sees on the screen.

What no one will see on the screen was what was going on inside my head during filming, which was an attempt to draw lines between events and factors that matter to the various topics I spoke about.

Things like the modern bulk wine market, for example, and the political and social unrest historically in France that gave rise to CRAV, and what I’ve seen of the reality of migrant labor around the world, and what I know about the emergence and set backs of the wine market in China. And and and.

The producers of Rotten did their magic and pieced together what is apparently a seamless, integrated narrative. (I say “apparently” only because I haven’t sat myself down yet to watch the episode.) The producers know their business incredibly well and, even though they had the most sophisticated equipment and recording technology, it still takes a real human to weave the story together.

This is where data comes in.

Not data itself, I should say, but its complement: the human skill, that is, that it takes to make sense of the technological output.

There’s even a name for this skill, as I learned at an event in Atlanta this week featuring Joe Sutherland of Search Discovery.

It’s called “Small AI,” where AI is short for Artificial Intelligence.

As I understand it, Small AI is a necessary counterpart to big data, machine learning, and the analytical tools of modern technology.

Small AI means that we still need real people doing human things.

It means that successful initiatives can’t have one (technology) without the other (human awareness of the issues that matter to an industry).

Just like the producers of Rotten, and just like we’re doing with Enolytics, what the world sees is only one small part of all that’s gone into the end product.

Small AI is what makes that small part understandable and relevant to our respective industries.

I hope it helps that underscoring the need for human skills is a critical part of what we do, even with all of the sophisticated tools that we put to use.

I’ve certainly been heartened by that thought this week. 

If you get a chance to watch Rotten, I hope you’ll enjoy it! Drop me a note and let me know how it goes.

Thank you,

Cathy

*** Rotten was produced by the amazing, award-winning team at Zero Point Zero who, you may recognize, is also behind productions such as Wasted! and Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain.