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“Ag is a really good candidate for Artificial Intelligence”

A Prospera executive predicts a large leap in automation within agriculture in the near future, which will eventually lead to autonomous machines driven by artificial intelligence (AI).

“There is not a consensus yet in academics as to what the definition of artificial intelligence is, but one definition would be machines with autonomous learning capabilities that given a big enough data set can model a statistical reality.”

Daniel Koppel, CEO of Prospera, told attendees of Bayer’s recent Future of Farming Dialogue that agriculture has seen recent improvements in mechanization, seed production and crop protection that have increased yields. Still, he says production is far from optimal because of issues that are difficult to understand, like reaching full genetic potential and determining exact causes of yield volatility.

“When we think about agriculture, we think it is a really good candidate for AI and one of the biggest reasons for that is the problems are just too complex for the explanation-driven scientific approach.”

Koppel says problems are segmented when building AI for agriculture because each crop acts differently.

“The consumer of the AI might be a human that is now making better decisions, or it will typically be a machine that can now autonomously react.”

Koppel says he expects to see a leap in automation and AI within agriculture because machines can be built to solve challenges that have too many parameters for humans to solve.