Grounded Intelligence: Why Most AI Innovations Never Reach the Field

AI is only as powerful as the data behind it—but what happens when that data is fragmented, incomplete, or excludes the very farmers it's meant to serve? In this episode of Grounded Intelligence , David Bergvinson is joined by Soumya Alamaru, Senior Consultant at Athena Infonomics , Jawoo Koo, Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) , and Michael Minkoff,...

Delivering effective AI advisory services to smallholder farmers depends less on model sophistication than on building the underlying ecosystem—shared data infrastructure, consortium economics, localized digital public goods, and farmer trust—without which even the most capable AI repeats the scaling failures of the previous generation of digital agriculture. Stewart Collis, Senior Program Officer...