Building Sustainable Food Systems Using Artificial Intelligence
The benefits of data-driven solutions have been well-recognized across nearly all industries worldwide. With the rapid advancements in the availability, affordability, and accessibility of AI, we are now witnessing a new wave of digital transformation at an unprecedented scale. AI has the potential to significantly enhance the efficiency of agricultural value chains, enabling providers to become more agile, streamlined, and effective in better serving communities.
AI’s transformative capabilities extend beyond operational efficiency. It can play a critical role in shifting agriculture from being a major contributor to over a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions to becoming a net carbon sink. Advanced AI solutions can aid in sequestering more than a third of atmospheric carbon, enhancing yields, and create new revenue streams for farmers through carbon credit markets.
This potential is especially crucial for frontier markets, which, unburdened by legacy infrastructure, have a unique opportunity to embrace AI swiftly. Just as mobile money accelerated financial inclusion in countries like Kenya and India’s IT revolution set a global benchmark, proactive investment and adoption by governments, entrepreneurs, and investors could propel these markets to lead in the AI era.
Accendo is at the forefront of this shift, collaborating with partners to build AI Labs and support the incubation of AI-focused startups that serve agricultural value chains. Our efforts are aimed at catalyzing digital transformation across various domains, including financial services, insurance, healthcare, carbon markets, and logistics.
While the field is complex and often surrounded by hype, this paper zeroes in on practical implications. Although the context touches on the global food system, the primary focus is to explore how the digital transformation of agricultural value chains, powered by AI, can foster sustainability and resilience for smallholder farmers, ultimately benefiting us all.
