How We Are Using AI to Help Scale a Mint Farm Startup
As a farmer, the key to a successful business is scale… we suppose? We’re machine learning folks, but we impact invest with proceeds from automated trade strategy execution. Through working with one of the companies we recently helped improve an irrigation system with, it seemed like a bit of a challenge to figure out how we could help it grow the business further. What if we introduced a bit of machine learning into the equation?
This week, we used a bit of NLP to attempt helping the visionary co-founder of Grows-ville scale her mint farming business. First, we added the problem sets to our recently developed Strategy Builder (powered by OpenAI). A series of problem statement inputs helped us understand where the bottlenecks were in the farm’s processes, as well as where improvements could be made.
From better mint crop fertilizer recommendations to ideas around post-harvesting best practices, the AI proceeded to develop marketing strategies to enhance the Kenyan-based farm’s brand, potential customer awareness and profit margins. Here is a collection of a few downloaded transcripts from this AI brainstorming session.
One of the interesting parts about regenerating and expanding on AI-generated outputs numerous times are the ideas that it can inspire through reading the suggestions and analysis. For example, in line with an AI-generated suggestion to expand the business lines, we learned something interesting. Peppermint oil has been proven to enhance the speed and quality of hair growth. In Kenya, where natural haircare products are extremely popular, could the business leverage the social media strategy the AI suggested in order to expand into branded, “from-the-farm” peppermint oil hair growth product lines?
Further, during our regular correspondence with our impact investment recipient founders, we are now able to send more comprehensive and informed lists of ideas, possible strategies, and questions to further understand businesses we are trying to help.
Maybe the robot apocalypse won’t be so bad after all.
