Defining Generative AI Agritech Value Stack

A Framework to discover how Generative AI can unlock value in native agritech contexts

Prologue

Adding ‘AI’ to your pitch deck, to your company tagline, and to your website domain suffix (.ai) are necessarily sufficient ways of inheriting the AI FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) hype cycle, albeit necessarily insufficient to understand where the real possibilities exist.

Every time I see freshly grown, supple weeds on farms on my field trips, I am reminded of hype cycles.

1. Social Media (~2009-11)

2. Big Data (~2011-14)

3. AI (~2022-Present)

The first two shaped me. Just like the third one might. Watching myself play around the crests of this third hype cycle reminds me of a timeless lesson that is relevant to those of us trying to sail through the murky waters of Climate Change, Agriculture, and Technology.

Weeds and hype cycles are poorly understood for a similar reason.

Much like weeds do a thankless healing job of protecting bare soil that is hungry for nourishing organic compounds and would have suffered soil erosion otherwise, hype cycles are a necessary thankless mechanism of frenzied over-investment to build underlying infrastructure (digital and otherwise) through ‘productive bubbles’.

The question, therefore, is: Which is a productive bubble and which is not?

When you run along the AI FOMO hype cycle with an ineffable sense of AI anxiety, you fall into the quicksand of premature optimization. For instance, you start to think that prompt engineering is the next big phenomenon (Growth Hacking Meets ChatGPT) and completely miss the forest for the trees.

There is a reason why futurist Roy Amara famously said,

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

Who would have thunk? Image Credits: Grace Witherell // Breaking Smart

How to make sense of the Generative AI hype wave from an agritech lens without falling into the cognitive bias trap Roy Amara is pointing out? Shall we define the Generative AI Agricultural Technology Value Stack?

Let’s dive in.