John Deere is adding an artificial-intelligence assistant to its Operations Center farm-management platform. Called JD, it is activated with a button in the app and is meant to work as a conversation partner for the farmer, answering questions from the data on machines, fields and operations already stored in the account.

Users can ask, for example, about fuel consumption, machine performance or crop yields, and JD analyses the historical data held in Operations Center to reply. The company gives fuel use over several years, help with a yield forecast, and picking the best harvest timing from past records as examples of what the assistant can do.

John Deere stresses that the data stay under the farmer's control. The model bases its answers only on what is in the user's own Operations Center account; the manufacturer says it does not sell farmers' business data, and users decide which third parties may see their data and can stop that flow at any time.

For now JD is being tested with a limited number of users in the United States. John Deere intends to make it more widely available later this year through Operations Center on the web and on mobile devices, and eventually through the displays in the cabs of tractors and other machines. Whether it will reach the Netherlands has not been said.

The move brings the kind of data querying already common in other industries to the farm office: instead of building reports, an operator asks a question in plain words and gets an answer drawn from the machine and field records the farm has been collecting for years.

Source: Future Farming