After years of battling misinformation, the potato industry is turning to AI for help. Experts say this new tool is helping them set the record straight, and the results already look promising.
“Right now, it’s working on Twitter, but we’re now expanding that out to other platforms as well,” explains Blair Richardson, President and CEO of Potatoes USA. “And we’ll be looking at Reddit, Instagram, Facebook initially, and then over time, even more. So, right now it’s all in a test stage. So, it’s pulling the data in and gives us examples of responses that it would generate.”
Richardson says creating innovative technology and upkeep are two separate costs, but in the long run, they will be well worth the upfront expenses.
“The initial investment is about half a million dollars,” Richardson said. “You know, once it’s created, there’s an ongoing operational cost to collect the data and pay for the computational power that is used to run the system. I mean, that is around $ 75,000 to $100,000 a year. So, as time goes on, you know, that’s less than the cost of a communications specialist in today’s world. And I think that it will be an exponential return on investment that we keep generating over many years.”
While artificial intelligence, or AI, is reshaping both jobs and messaging in agriculture, CoBank data suggests human expertise still matters.
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