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According to the FAO, the word’s population is believed to reach 10 billion people by 2050¹, a phenomenon that will determine a significant growth of the overall food demand. This, together with climate change, is putting a lot of pressure on the agriculture industry, which is required to become more efficient in providing food to the whole planet. Fortunately, AI-enabled solutions are being more and more implemented to deal with several problems and tasks related to this industry, such as workforce shortage, crops monitoring, controlling infestations, soil monitoring and precision farming using predictive analytics ².

 

Solving workforce shortages using AI and robots. Agriculture has always been a labour-intensive industry, where several seasonal workers were required to perform several tiring and often repetitive tasks². In recent year, the number of people interested in this kind of works has dramatically reduced, thus increasing the gap between required and available workforce³. At the same time, several of those tasks can now be automated and accomplished by AI-powered robots, which can be faster and more accurate than humans. For instance, the American company Harvest Croo⁴ is currently developing an automatic strawberry harvester capable of substituting more than 30 human workers, where artificial intelligence is used to locate the strawberries in the field, inspect them to assess whether they are ripe or not and pick them.

An image of the automatic strawberry harvester by Harvest Croo

 

Soil and crops monitoring using machine learning. Artificial intelligence can also be used to continuously monitor the levels of different nutrients, as well as pollutants, present in the soil⁵. This is done mainly by the combination of cameras, which are used to collect images, and image recognition software, which is used to assess the health conditions of different plants and detect, from data such as the colours of their leaves, whether they are exposed to harmful chemical substances or whether they require more fertilizer. An interesting application of this technology comes from Vinewiew⁶, a company that offers monitoring solutions powered by artificial intelligence and drones to keep under control several aspects of vineyards: while drones are used to collect data, the provided software will be able to detect various diseases, make informed irrigation decisions and track the ripening of the grapes, thus allowing the winemakers to be more efficient and save more resources.

An image collected by a drone where AI was able to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy grapevines

 

To conclude, it is possible to notice how artificial intelligence is currently disrupting agriculture, allowing new firms to enter by developing new business models, improving the overall efficiency within the industry, increasing the supply of food and tackling some of the main issues that it is currently facing, from new diseases to global warming.

 

References

1) FAO. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2017, 2017. THE STATE OF

FOOD AND AGRICULTURE LEVERAGING FOOD SYSTEMS FOR INCLUSIVE RURAL

TRANSFORMATION. 978-92-5-109873-8pp. 1–181.

2)https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/07/05/how-ai-is-transforming-agriculture/#1d6af81a4ad1

3) https://harvestcroo.com/about/#why-automation

4) https://harvestcroo.com/

5) https://customerthink.com/the-role-of-artificial-intelligence-in-agriculture-sector/

6) https://www.vineview.com/data-products/

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Last week the Financial Times posted an article¹ about how mobile gaming and cloud gaming are now reshaping the videogame industry, displacing some of the incumbents and letting new players join the competition. it is therefore interesting to analyse how the internet has influenced the platform business model that characterizes this industry and how technologies provided different ways for companies to implement platform envelopment.

In fact, since its birth in 1972, the video game industry was characterized by fierce competition between different platforms: Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Sony and Microsoft all competed for decades by managing both developers and gamers, understanding how to create value from their interactions and how to extract some of that value². This was particularly difficult in the early years of the industry when companies did not have a clear understanding about how to how externalities could affect the different actors: the most notable case is perhaps the one of Atari, which lost market leadership in the 1980s due to its inability to charge the money side of the market³ (game developers), which lead to a decrease in the overall quality of available games that made its consoles less appealing for consumers⁴. Learning from this episode, firms like Sony and Microsoft understood how customers are sensitive to quality and implemented their pricing strategy accordingly (as is described in Eisenmann et al. 2006⁵).

However, things have changed since 2006. With the diffusion of smartphones, developers realized that they could reach new market niches² by distributing their games on these new platforms,  rather than on the console ones. This allowed the entry of both Google and Apple, which were able to exploit their user bases and infrastructures to partially  “envelop” their competitors by implementing a conglomeration attack and, by charging (questionable⁶) fees, obtaining a significant amount of market revenues.

More recently, the advent of cloud gaming (which exploits the high processing capacity of server farms to allow people to play with not-so-powerful devices) might potentially once again reshape the industry boundaries: new players like Amazon, with limited experience in the industry but large user base and computational power, are trying to enter⁷ implementing envelopment, while several incumbents are trying to defend their position using the same technology⁸.

1) https://www.ft.com/content/ed5aba41-c174-4b1f-8f14-8637f2da0af0

2) https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/31/the-history-of-gaming-an-evolving-community/

3) https://www.bugsplat.com/blog/video-games/great-video-game-crash-1983/

4) https://www.digitalspy.com/videogames/a453849/atari-retrospective-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-gaming-giant/

5) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/294221616_Strategies_for_two-sided_markets

6) https://www.macrumors.com/guide/epic-games-vs-apple/

7) https://www.ft.com/content/d017aadb-f865-4567-b0ec-c0f4bf3d6401

8) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/xbox-game-pass-ultimate/cfq7ttc0khs0?activetab=pivot%3aoverviewtab