Building Farmers' Trust in Artificial Intelligence
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Many farmers are still understandably skeptical that artificial intelligence is a safe and factual resource to be used in the ag industry. Kit Barron, head of data science and analytics at Farmers Business Networks says that’s why they’ve trained their AI-powered ag advisor, called “Norm,” to be backed by human expertise.
Barron: Starting from the initial training, we actually had some of our internal vets and agronomists kind of actively helping us develop a list of training questions. So what questions do we want to make sure Norm gets right. And then they evaluate the answers like, “This is good but Norm’s ignored this particular thing, or this is totally wrong.” And so that was part of the initial training. Now what we do is Norm actually helps us classify the types of responses, so Norm can look at all the thousands of questions that the broader member community has asked and classify them. So, we’ve got 165 that are around soil conditions, and so then we can send a subset of those to a crop consultant that focuses on soil conditions, for example, and they can in a doc, go through and evaluate the quality of the responses. So that’s very much, we’re kind of building that automated process so that our humans can review in an anonymized way of course, because to obviously protect the identity of our members asking the questions, but its a really great system and I think they’re enjoying it as well.
Barron says they’re using this system to crosscheck Norm’s accuracy and build trust between farmers and AI.
