How Land O’Lakes Convinced Farmers to Use AI – “They’re Entrepreneurs at Heart”

at wealth‘s Brainstorm AI Conference Monday in San Francisco, Teddy Bekele, CTO of agricultural cooperative Land O’Lakes and Fiona Tan, CTO of online furniture retailer Wayfair LLC, compared and contrasted how employees at their companies welcomed or raised an eyebrow at efforts to introduce AI into the supply chain.

Land O’Lakes uses AI to estimate supply and demand of different products at different times of the year. The technology has become a tool used directly by the company’s farmers. Farmers see it as support for their decisions and not as a substitute for their expertise, says Bekele. But getting farmers fully on board will take some convincing, he says, as planting and harvesting are high-risk decisions. “Farmers will always try things, they are entrepreneurs at heart,” explained Bekele. “However, to fully roll it out into their operations, they want to make sure the solution really works.”

Some AI models may seem counterintuitive to farmers at first. Bekele gave the example of using AI models to determine the best locations to grow crops based on climate, topography and soil. Sometimes the AI ​​proposal differs from where farmers have grown crops in the past. “On paper, [the A.I. model] doesn’t sound right,” says Bekele. But with some explanation, farmers get the idea.

AI can also serve as a sort of second opinion for farmers. They enter their own data into the AI ​​tools and use the system to validate their own instincts.

Wayfair is a digital-native company, so its employees are fairly open to adopting new technologies. However, Tan says a tech-savvy workforce can be frustrated that AI isn’t moving faster. “Sometimes there’s impatience for the models to work right away,” Tan said. “It’s not like it’s being deployed today and everything is going to magically work,” she said.

When Wayfair adds AI to internal processes, it starts with low-stakes tasks to mitigate the risk of error and ensures the technology’s work is still human-verified, says Tan. “In marketing, for example, the worst thing that can happen is you pay too much for an offer, so we can tolerate that,” she said. “In other areas, like looking at images or text for the product to determine the quality of the furniture, we let models make suggestions or recommendations, and people can go back and make sure it looks good,” she said.