AgrodatAi launches a 24/7 chatbot with annual user numbers expected to reach 50,000
About AgrodatAi
AgrodatAi is a digital platform designed for all stakeholders in the agricultural supply chain such as farmers, traders, processors, suppliers, banks, insurance companies, shippers, logistics agents, research facilities, educational institutions, and local and government entities.
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About Servinformación
Servinformación is a company that develops intelligent solutions to organize and enhance its customers’ information via geolocation.
Thanks to Google Cloud, the company developed Don Tulio, a chatbot for farmers available 24/7 with information and channels to manage credit and insurance.
Results
- 24/7 availability
- 2,000 interactions with users per month through the messaging service
- +100,000 notifications delivered from the app
It provides solutions for +20,000 farmers
AgrodatAi is a Colombian company that develops technological solutions for the farming industry. The company aims to furnish tools for the stakeholders in the production chain to help them make better decisions based on their business needs, location, and products of interest, and also to provide links between them.
In 2018, AgrodatAi joined Google Cloud to improve the quality of the service it provides its customers to meet the farming industry’s major challenges.
One of the company’s main difficulties was beginning an information organization process to provide a centralized service. As Juan Pablo López, Project Leader of AgrodatAi, explained: “Information is scattered across the Colombian farming industry. One of the first challenges was to centralize over 100 public and private databases to access valuable information from just one location and in the same language.”
AgrodatAi promotes a solution to organize, capture, process, and add value to agroecological, climate, market, production, yield, and other information, which facilitates decision-making. It also provides links to manage credit and agricultural insurance.
Hand-in-hand with producers
One of the company’s main goals was to calculate the best locations to sell products. As a result, it set out to build a model to link the location of the production units (farms) with marketplaces or livestock auctions throughout Colombia.
Factors that proved essential in starting to create this model were the help and advice of Google Cloud partner Servinformación, as it trained all the team members so they could embark on the digital innovation journey, and also the farming industry expertise of one of the company’s partners, SFA Cebar.
AgrodatAi realized the starting point to achieve this goal was creating a tool that was more accessible and easy for users to use and understand. The chatbot "Don Tulio, your farming advisor" resulted from this need.
The lack of internet coverage and limited access to computers in Colombia’s rural areas presented AgrodatAi with its first challenge: building a 24/7 tool.
Users can contact Don Tulio through different channels, for example chat or text messages sent to their cell phones or smartphones. This is how the company came up against another of the industry’s challenges: digital literacy.
"Our goal was to be more accessible to farmers. With Don Tulio, we have managed to listen to them and understand what they really need. In short, it’s a way of getting to know them and feeling closer to them."
—Carolina Huertas Garcés, Manager, AgrodatAiBesides the help of Servinformación and SFA Cebar, seeking alliances with unions and producer associations promoting the use of these technologies was a crucial step in producing these tools. That is how AgrodatAi has been able to improve user experience and provide this solution free of charge.
As Carolina Huertas Garcés highlights, “With Don Tulio, we created a solution that tells farmers the best markets to sell their products in” and thus respond to the need for reliable information.
Implementation phase
The process began in 2018 and lasted 10 months. In this phase, Google Cloud’s tools helped build the “best sale option” model, providing farmers with information to increase their bargaining power when selling their products.
The second phase started in late 2019 and was completed in December 2020. In this phase, the main change revolved around Don Tulio, and Dialogflow played a major role.
“Don Tulio is how we reach producers, but also a chance to provide much more information and advice on both technical and business-model issues. Using AI for that provides a huge opportunity for growth.”
—Juan Pablo López, Project Leader, AgrodatAiGoogle Cloud’s tools have been vital during these two initial phases because they allowed AgrodatAi to create a solution with huge competitive advantages in the technological market for the farming industry.
The use of Vertex AI enabled scaling more than 60 predictive pricing models for agricultural products in several markets, while Dataflow and Firebase have been instrumental for storing the information needed for users to interact on the platform.
It has also enabled the deployment of direct messaging in cell-phone apps, sending more than 100,000 notifications from the app thanks to Firebase Cloud Messaging’s performance.
In addition, with BigQuery, they were able to store all the information processed in Dataflow in a matter of seconds.
“At Servinformación we knew that Google Cloud was the most suitable cloud platform, as we had not only gained experience from other projects, but also realized the data warehousing solutions, Google Maps, App Engine, and Dialogflow, would be essential.”
—Mónica Patiño, President, ServinformaciónEarly results
With “Don Tulio, your farming advisor,” AgrodatAi provides farmers with information quickly. They get an answer five to 10 seconds after sending a query to the bot. Also, thanks to Dialogflow, the company managed to handle more than 2,000 interactions per month with users via the messaging service.
Information agility and accuracy make this tool reliable and accessible in real time.
The company currently has over 20,000 registered users, most of them farmers, for whom the service is free of charge. AgrodatAi’s goal is to end 2021 with 50,000 registered producers.
At the same time, by implementing CI/CD (continuous integration and delivery) strategies with Cloud Build, the company has managed to automate service and application delivery effectively and efficiently. By using Firebase Dynamic Links, AgrodatAi was able to deliver password-free access to over 8,000 users.
By linking pricing schemes with demand or tool usage, AgrodatAi managed to reduce costs in project planning.
Accelerating change
The situation caused by the pandemic has presented AgrodatAi with new challenges. Faced with changes in work routines and increased demand, the company decided to move into a new phase.
In November 2020, the company relaunched the platform and updated the farmers’ registry, and the frequency of use. It also increased browsing times due to the emergence of new communication channels and connection tools linked to agricultural credit and insurance.
As a result of Google Cloud’s tools, AgrodatAi is constantly transforming and evolving to adapt to changing business needs, which impact the development and building of each service capability the company offers.
The company’s current development is focused on providing Internet of Things (IoT) services for capturing specific data in the farmers’ production units.
To achieve this, the company is thinking about using Cloud Composer, which provides easy and automatic management, as well as BigQuery ML for building recommendation models and IoT Core. This will enable them to add the information they want to capture from IoT sensors and manage the data from each production unit.
At the same time, they are working on developing La Plaza de AgrodatAi, a space where people can buy and sell farming products, and on updating and constantly improving the platform’s user experience. This will allow them to further develop the Don Tulio chatbot so it can work via text messaging to reach rural areas without internet access.
AgrodatAi’s future plans are to build a tool to monitor crops via satellite images and to handle queries about pests and diseases via Don Tulio using images, together with Google Cloud, Servinformación, and SFA Cebar.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About AgrodatAi
AgrodatAi is a digital platform designed for all stakeholders in the agricultural supply chain such as farmers, traders, processors, suppliers, banks, insurance companies, shippers, logistics agents, research facilities, educational institutions, and local and government entities.
About Servinformación
Servinformación is a company that develops intelligent solutions to organize and enhance its customers’ information via geolocation.