India Presidency of global AI forum GPAI has brought agriculture as one of the top sectors that can be transformed with the help of artificial intelligence, the forum's multi-stakeholder group chair said on Thursday.

While speaking at GPAI (Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence) Summit 2023, elected chair of the multi-stakeholder and co-chair of the steering Committee Inma Martinez said that many of the forum's member are very keen to put agriculture in their artificial intelligence roadmaps and agendas. Martinez is also Co-Chair and Project Lead Ai in Agriculture and Farming,

"I am very proud to say to that India's Presidency has bought agriculture at the top of one of the things that they want to achieve with artificial intelligence," she said.

India has taken over as GPAI Presidency from Japan for 2024. Martinez said climate change is affecting dynamics of agriculture and since this sector in many countries is as big as their GDP there is need to make it more optimized using the superpower of artificial intelligence.

She said the working group wants to educate everyone through GPAI Agro Portal.

"There is a misconception that when you bring artificial intelligence to an artisanal industry, the jobs will go away. It actually is not the case. Farmers have very hard lives, trying to yield product from the land. When technology and AI comes in, they are in possession of information that helps them make better decisions," Martinez said.

She said when someone decides to grow grain then it has achieved a specific percentage of protein for human consumption.

"If you want to sell the grain for human consumption, if you don't achieve that quality, then the grain has to be given for feeding animals. If you don't get any money for it, basically you work for free the whole year. So, we need to increase the value," Martinez said. She said concerns around yield is not so much the quantity that can be derived from the land but the quality of the product.

"We need to feed people with nutritional values," Martinez said. She said that her group at GPAI has started the roadmap of integrating work with organizations at national level that also have innovation centers or labs that focus on agriculture.

"I'm hoping that we will be able to establish these relationships here in India and in other countries. My targets right now are France, Spain, Holland, where we have the strongest cases of AI in Europe. Then build India and Australia in 2024, as well," she said.

Innovation and Commercialization Working Group co-chair Laurence Liew spoke about empowering small and medium businesses through the AI4SME portal that can be adopted by various countries and customised to meet their need.

He said SMEs make up a significant portion of the economy. "We want to make sure that SMEs are provided access to AI expertise and solutions by curated solution providers. This portal can help SMEs to become more innovative and increase efficiency," Liew said.

He said AI has the potential to improve efficiency across industries and by encouraging SMEs to adopt AI SMEs to streamline the current business processes.

Liew said AI4SME portal will be a need to help SMEs and solution providers come together, enjoy faster collaboration, promote partnerships, and hopefully lead to new innovations and business opportunities.

"For next year, we hope to get more countries to do their own AI for the group but also create new go to market resources and guidance for other operators to better help them engage SMEs and new AI solution providers. The group will also tie together and create a new resource AI4SME, a simplified introduction to AI for SMEs based on years of AI for everyone," Liew said.

GPAI, Co-Chair of IP Committee and Co-Lead for AI & Climate Committee Lee Tiedrich said one of the key takeaways from her group's work is there is need for common contractual definitions.

"When you have different parties negotiating and they don't understand that language. We need to come up with those terms," she said.

Tiedrich said there also are big applications here with respect to open source.

"One of the things that came up with our work is that people are talking about open-source open access with respect to AI models, but the current open-source agreements don't really address some of the unique aspects of AI models," she said.