I believe that technology-basedgrading will increase consumer trust going forward. Let’s take an example of carat weight and cut which are both performed on technology. Today everyone trusts blindly these two parameters which are measured and graded using technology. Now with AI grading, colour and clarity can also be graded using technology which will only increase the consistency and accuracy of such grading thereby increasing consumer confidence. I would even dare to say that today’s young consumer trusts technology even more than any manual process.

As a technology company, Sarine is always in the process of researching and developing innovative new ideas that can add value to the different segments of the diamond pipeline. Over the past 30 years, we had focused on developing technology that adds value mainly to the manufacturing segment. I believe we can proudly say that our technology has played a crucial role in transforming diamond manufacturing into what it is today. Therefore, it was only natural that we also looked how we can add value to other parts of the pipeline, and today I can say that we are involved in different technology based projects both for the producers (miners) as well as the retailers thereby covering the entire pipeline from the mine to the consumer. Even though technology has transformed the manufacturing segment over the past 30 years, today’s world is highly dependent on technology and data so we believe that technology is even more important than before and will play an even larger role than in the past.

Sarine introduced the world’s first technology for cut grading (DiaMension^TM) in 1992. This technology which is now in its 6^th generation has become theglobal standard for grading cut used by manufacturers, retailers and grading labs. In 2016 we then became the first company to introduce AI -based grading technologies for both color and clarity.

I believe that technology-basedgrading will increase consumer trust going forward. Let’s take an example of carat weight and cut which are both performed on technology. Today everyone trusts blindly these two parameters which are measured and graded using technology. Now with AI grading, colour and clarity can also be graded using technology which will only increase the consistency and accuracy of such grading thereby increasing consumer confidence. I would even dare to say that today’s young consumer trusts technology even more than any manual process.

The impact of automated AI- based grading will be dramatic… but in a positive manner. It will shorten the grading cycle time from a number of weeks (sometimes even longer) to days, enabling the customer to shorten his overall manufacturing and sales cycle thereby being able to offer his polish goods to the market much faster. Having grading capabilities onsite at the customer will also save costs of shipping, insurance as well as cost of money (during the time the goods are at the lab). Enabling the customer the flexibility of setting his own priorities rather than being dependent on the quantities of goods at the lab is another advantage that also cannot be underestimated (generally everyone wants the goods graded at the same time which creates long backlogs due to the inability of the labs to scale up/down quickly). Naturally human involvement will not become redundant but the type of skill sets will change, transitioning the workforce from using a loupe to working on advanced AI technologies.

Technology based grading is still a small percentage of the total diamonds graded as such technology is still new. We are starting to see a wider acceptance of grading based on AI. As the technology is starting to mature and has only been available commercially for a few years at our grading labs. In the near future, Sarine will be introducing our eGrading™ technology which will enable the grading process to be done at source (rather than in a Lab) thereby saving significant time and cost as the diamonds will be able to be graded on-site without having to send them to a lab.  As the advantages of such technology are so significant we expect that within a number of years most diamonds graded will be done using AI- based technology.

One of the major advantages of automated AI - based grading is that the level of consistency is significantly better than manual grading. Unlike graders, technology is ‘immune’ to the many factors that create most of the grading inconsistencies.  Human graders are impacted by many external factors including fatigue, environmental conditions, mental conditions (mood), lighting conditions etc… Therefore, as AI - based grading consistency is much higher than manual grading there are expected to be very few disputes on grading.

That is actually a very important question as the quality and validity of the data that is used in the learning algorithms is critical to the ability to grade correctly. The learning data is collected from a very wide range of sources and is verified prior to using it so the chances of such mistakes or manipulations are very low. Sarine as a public company also implements best practices in terms of data security, monitoring and data access in order to ensure the grading algorithms and data are independent and not influenced by any external source. Lastly, unlike manual grading where there is no audit trail to the grading process, technology has a complete audit trail enabling us to track the grading process of each and every diamond that is graded.

I think the purpose of blockchain and cryptography is mostly misunderstood when it comes to traceability. Blockchains main purpose is to store data rather than ensure its accuracy or verify its validity. Therefore, I believe that Block chain platforms have a role to play in storing information but are in no way any assurance of the provenance of the diamond.Sarine Diamond Journey traceability™ solution has an API that can integrate into our customers or other 3^rd party blockchain platforms if needed. I actually wrote a blog a while back specifically on this subject - https://blog.sarine.com/blockchain-equals-traceability-or-not