Index:
Farmers Business Network and Google Collaborate on AI
Context in AI
Are You The Starting Point or is John Deere?
Influence Erosion
What should an ag retailer be doing about it?
1. Farmers Business Network and Google Collaborate on AI
This week FBN and Google AI announced a partnership.
As part of the partnership, Google will provide FBN with early access to frontier models and expertise in model development. FBN will work closely with Google to evaluate advanced models against complex agricultural reasoning tasks. The collaboration aims to improve AI performance in real world applications in agriculture.
This news is less exciting than it tries to convey. There are three components to it:
FBN gains access to Google’s frontier models (best/newest models). As mentioned in story #1, this is increasingly undifferentiated.
FBN is saying they are providing “context” which is a key missing component to deriving adequate insights or recommendations from an AI system. Context meaning weather, agronomic information, geospatial information, financial information etc. Effectively, FBN is saying they are connecting agents and AI to all of the required softwares and systems that would deliver this information to deliver the best informed recommendations. FBN, and many others, are missing connections to systems where this context lives.
FBN says they are connecting the models, and the context, to commerce. Said another way, connecting the AI system to the ability to purchase products, creating what I suspect is a standardized workflow for the farmer.
The positioning from FBN makes sense, but I think it will struggle for true value creation, but it reinforces the need to think critically about “context” and who has it.
2. Context in AI
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