Last week, a farmer in Nyamira seeing the flash rainfall went knocking on all the main agrovets in the county and adjacent areas for a particular variety of peas without success.

Keen to maximise the proceeds from peas production but on this specific variety, he called a major stockist in Nairobi to find out if it was available, but before he got a comprehensive response, the showers had disappeared.

Until recently, using the words ‘AI’ and ‘agriculture’ in the same sentence may have seemed like a strange combination. AI is Artificial Intelligence, a theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making and translation between languages.

However, for some 455 farmers piloting an Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered conversation technology platform, chatbot, it’s a different course altogether as they are able to predict the weather, suitable for planting, harvesting and storage. They will even tell how the whole value chain looks.

Positive response

“The chatbot responds to prompts in text, voice or images for instance of a crop accompanying a post. It also supports English and Kiswahili languages,” Seema Gohil, DigiFarm Kenya Limited’s director told People Daily during a recent interview.

Some of the AI-powered success stories by these farmers will be showcased at the Safaricom Regional Engineering Summit that kicks off this morning in Nairobi.

With agronomy content available on maize, dairy and potato farming being the pilot crops alongside coffee, Mshauri wa Shamba by DigiFarm and Opportunity International identified 1,000 farmers to navigate the chatbot, which is accessible on WhatsApp.

Only with a plan to incorporate more value chains post-pilot, Gohil says, the solution which has been on pilot since January 22, 2025, has witnessed some positive outcomes.

“We have witnessed one thing in particular, that AI is revolutionising small-holder farming in Kenya and beyond.

“About 88.7 per cent of the active 455, have successful advisories and found answers with 255, about 50 per cent, giving positive feedback on user satisfaction,” she said.

 Digifarm is a fully owned subsidiary of Safaricom, which focuses on smallholder farmers and their agriculture ecosystem.