With the help of Google cloud, Servinformacion and SFA Cebar; Agrodat Ai develops "Don Tulio", a chatbot for agricultural producers, available 24/7 with information and channels to manage credit and insurance.

Results

• Availability 24/7.
• 2,000 interactions per month with users through messaging.
• +100,000 notifications delivered from the app.

AgrodatAi is a Colombian company dedicated to the development of technological solutions for the agricultural sector. In this way, the company seeks to provide tools to the different actors in the production chain to help them make better decisions according to their commercial needs, location and products of interest, and, in addition, to foster connections between them.

In 2018, it joined Google Cloud to take a further step in the quality of the service it provides to its customers and thus face the great challenges of the agricultural sector.

One of the great challenges of the company was to initiate a process to organize the information and, in this way, provide a centralized service. As Juan Pablo López, Project Leader of AgrodatAi, explains, “in Colombia the agricultural sector has very dispersed information. One of the first challenges was to centralize more than 100 databases, public and private, to access valuable information from a single place and in the same language ”.

AgrodatAi promotes a solution to organize, capture, process and give added value to agroecological, climate, market, production and yield information, among others, that facilitates decision-making. In addition, it encourages connections to manage credit and agricultural insurance.

One of the main objectives was to calculate the optimal places to market the products. Thus, the company set out to build a model that would make it possible to relate the location of the productive units (farms) with the different market places or livestock auctions at the national level.

In order to take the first step in the construction of this model, the help and advice of Servinformación, a Google Cloud partner, was key, providing training to all members of the work teams to be able to start the path to digital innovation, in addition from the experience in the agricultural sector of one of its partners, SFA Cebar.

AgrodatAi understood that the starting point to achieve the proposed objective was to create a tool that is easy to use, understandable and close to users. From this need the chatbot "Don Tulio, your agricultural advisor" was born.

The lack of Internet coverage in rural areas and the little access to computers in rural areas of Colombia put AgrodatAi in front of the first great challenge: to build an accessible tool 24/7.

Users can connect with Don Tulio through different channels, by chat or receive text messages from their conventional cell phones or smartphones. In this way, the company faces another of the challenges of the industry: digital literacy.

“Our objective was to get closer to the agricultural producers. With Don Tulio, we have been able to listen and understand what they really need. In short, it is a way to get to know them and feel them closer. "

-Carolina Huertas Garcés, Manager, AgrodatAi

In this sense, in addition to the help of Servinformación and SFA Cebar, it was key to approach the tools through alliances with unions and producer associations that promote the use of these technologies. Thus, it has been possible to improve the user experience and provide this solution for free for them.

Even, as Carolina Huertas Garcés points out, “with Don Tulio we created a solution that allows producers to know which are the best markets to market their products” and thus respond to the need for reliable information.

With "Don Tulio, your agricultural advisor", AgrodatAi provides agricultural producers with information in a short time. Within 5-10 seconds of querying the bot, the producer receives a response. In addition, thanks to Dialogflow, it was possible for the company to respond to more than 2,000 interactions per month with users through messaging.

The agility and accuracy of the information makes this tool reliable and accessible in real time.

Currently, the company has more than 20,000 registered users, of which the majority are agricultural producers, to whom the service is offered free of charge. Its objective is to end 2021 with a total of 50,000 registered agricultural producers.

In turn, with the implementation of CI / CD strategies (integration and continuous delivery) with Cloud Build, the company has been able to automate the delivery of services and applications quickly and efficiently. While with the use of Firebase Dynamic Links it was able to deliver access without the use of password to more than 8,000 users.

Thanks to the charging scheme associated with demand or use of the tools, AgrodatAi was able to reduce costs in project planning.

The situation put AgrodatAi in front of new challenges. Given the changes in work routines and the increase in demand, the company decided to move towards a new stage.

In November 2020, the company relaunched the platform and updated the register of producers, the frequency of use and increased browsing time as a result of new communication channels and new connection tools associated with credit and agricultural insurance.

Thanks to Google Cloud tools, AgrodatAi is in constant transformation and evolution due to the changing needs of the business, which impact the development and construction of each of the functionalities of the service provided by the company.

Currently, the development of the company is focused on providing Internet of Things (IoT) services for the capture of specific data from the productive units of the producers.

To achieve this, the company is planning to use Cloud Composer, which provides easy management automatically, as well as BigQuery ML for building recommendation models and IoT Core. Thus, they will be able to add the information they hope to capture from the IoT sensors and manage the data of each production unit.

In turn, they are working on the development of "La Plaza de AgrodatAi", a space where you can buy and sell agricultural products, as well as constantly updating and improving the platform's user experience. This will allow to continue developing the chatbot "Don Tulio" to work by text messaging with the aim of reaching rural areas without Internet access.

In the future, AgrodatAi plans to build a tool to monitor crops through satellite images, as well as consultations of pests and diseases with images through "Don Tulio", with the help of Google Cloud, Servinformación and SFA Cebar.

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