AI and the Problems Worth Solving

From The President

AI and the Problems Worth Solving

By Brent Kemp, AgGateway President and CEO

Among the dozens of websites that insist I need more AI-related content in my life, LinkedIn recently caught my attention. After a bit of scrolling, it served me a Photoshop tutorial on using AI features to edit a photo of a broken plate. Commentors focused on “working smarter, not harder” and how well the AI selected textures to seamlessly fill the void where the broken and missing pieces of the plate had been. I couldn’t help but think it was a poor use of time when there was surely an undamaged plate that could have been photographed.

Almost immediately following was an opinion article by Paul Windemuller, a dairy farmer and ag tech enthusiast, discussing the impact of AI on the job force. You can read his words for yourself here (https://paulwindemuller.com/blog/f/the-retraining-myth-and-the-new-learning-economy) and it’s worth reading and considering. One of the sentences that jumped out at me was a predictor of success in the transition to AI use: “A real problem you actually care about solving.”

That’s a great point, and actually a salient summary of the prevailing attitude at our North America Mid-Year Meeting. In particular, both our general roundtables and our Ag Retail forum brought up AI use in AgGateway as an engagement opportunity and an organizational efficiency requirement. Member volunteers are excited to learn more and make use of AI in the context of resource discovery. Their specific, real problem is that documentation and resources for implementing messages are difficult to navigate, hard to find, and in some cases inaccessible to non-members. They hope that leveraging AI tools may help clarify requirements and speed implementation, enabling companies to realize value faster. This in turn allows them to implement more, and advocate for wider participation in the standards development and resource adoption processes.

As for the Photoshop example, in my opinion the problem wasn’t solved by digitally removing the evidence of the broken and missing pieces of the plate. If the need was to have a picture of a whole plate, then I suspect any plate would have sufficed. The purpose of a plate, though, is to hold food and a broken plate can’t do the job. Filling in the digital holes didn’t make the plate whole and solve the “plate problem.”

AI can be a powerful tool in helping us find and achieve process efficiencies and discover information faster than we might otherwise have been able to do. Some things, though, like prioritizing resources for implementation and scheduling the development to integrate standards and transform processes require commitment to address problems outside the scope of AI.

And those real problems that reside within your business unit’s awareness? Bring them – and the businesspeople – to the table so they can be discussed and worked on. AI may be part of the solution, but the solution starts with identifying the problem you want to solve and bringing passionate people to the table to figure things out together. AgGateway is a great place for that to happen.