April 28-30, 2025

All Speakers

Dog and cat food research experts who will present at Petfood Forum & Petfood Essentials

Bill Ward
Founder & CEO
Northslope Technologies
Bill Ward is the founder and CEO of Northslope Technologies, an AI company that delivers purpose-built operational software for the world's most important institutions. Northslope is engineer-led and outcome-first, serving customers in healthcare, financial services, renewable energy, aviation, manufacturing, consumer goods and government, with headquarters in Denver, Colorado, U.S., and London, England, U.K. Previously, Ward led customer engagements and product teams at Palantir Technologies, delivering complex solutions for some of Palantir’s largest commercial and defense customers around the world. At Enigma Technologies, he created and led the forward-deployed product organization, building tailored machine learning products for Fortune 100 customers. Most recently, Ward served as COO of Biofire Technologies, a defense hardware company. He is also a startup advisor and angel investor.
Date/TimeTitle
Tue Apr 29
1:30 PM - 2:35 PM
Pet food technology sessions: AI focus areas
KCCC 2102A-B
  • Transformative potential for AI in pet food innovation, sales creation and sustainability — Rajan Lukose, Ph.D., chief data scientist, Cambridge Technology, explores practical applications for AI in the pet food industry, demonstrating how companies can smartly leverage these revolutionary tools to improve research and testing procedures, product development, supply chain efficiencies, revenue generation and sustainability tracking.
  • AI is transforming marketing: What are the benefits, challenges and applications for pet food? — Hana Bieliauskas, senior vice president and partner, Inspire PR Group, explains how artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way food companies develop, market and sell products, connect with customers and analyze data. AI has sped up the development of new products by leveraging predictive analytics and consumer data, and it can apply algorithms to identify trends in the food sector and predict their growth. Through pet food case studies, she provides insights on using AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot to build brands, develop marketing strategies and messages, automate marketing emails, draft social media posts and target digital ads to the right people at the right times to maximize views, click-through rates and more.
  • Understanding AI to streamline pet food manufacturing — Matt Lueger, executive vice president of sales, Northwind Technical Services, and Bill Ward, founder and CEO, Northslope Technologies, discuss different artificial intelligence (AI) concepts, including machine learning, large language models and generative AI, highlighting their key differences and real-world applications for pet food production. They address concerns related to data security, discussing how cloud computing can offer secure, scalable solutions. To demonstrate how AI is being used to improve productivity and add to the bottom line, they also share case studies, including applying a generative AI tool to pet food manufacturing, inventory planning implementation and a machine learning application.