Why KrishiAI wants to build one AI system for the entire farm

Research, Science & Innovation

Nagpur: For years, agri-tech has often grown in pieces. One application diagnoses a crop disease, another provides weather information, another helps with markets, while schemes, soil and livestock can sit in entirely different digital silos. For the farmer, the problem is obvious: the farm does not operate in silos. That fragmentation is the starting point for KrishiAI’s proposition. The Nagpur-based startup believes the next generation of agricultural technology should not ask farmers to find a different app every time a new problem appears. Instead, it is building Vasundhara AgriOS as a common operating layer for the farm, bringing multiple forms of agricultural intelligence into one system. Abhilash Khopde, Director at KrishiAI, says the thinking behind the initiative was to deliberately move away from the prevailing model of building separate digital products for separate agricultural problems. “The company’s approach is to make the different capabilities work together, so that an answer about irrigation, for instance, can take into account the farm’s soil, crop stage and weather rather than treating the question in isolation,” he says. Shweta Kirad, Director at KrishiAI, points to the farmer’s experience at the centre of this approach. The aim, she says, is not to make technology more...