Putting AI to Work in Your Ag Business

By Dan Aberhart | Sponsored article

Before we build anything with AI, I want to understand the person who will use it. What work comes naturally to you? What matters to you?
And what keeps piling up even though you know it needs doing? Those answers give us a useful place to start.

That is the thinking behind Growing Your Future Operating System, or GYFOS, which I discussed with Tracy Brunet on Impact Farming. I want to help people in agriculture put AI to work on real jobs, with the goal of buying back time for the work they do best and the life they want outside the business.

I grew up in agriculture and have spent years in agricultural sales and business. I love ideas and seeing what might be possible. Following through on every detail is a different story. Understanding that about myself helps me see where I need support. Your strengths and frustrations will be different, so your system should be different too.

We start with what I call your wiring. Through a personal operating diagnostic and an inventory of your activities, we look at how you work, what you want to achieve and where your time is going. You might be doing a lot of things simply because you have always been the person who does them.

From there, we build out your GYFOS workspace around your goals and the way you like to organize information. It gives the work some context. An AI tool knows very little about your business until you explain what you are trying to do, how you do it and what a useful result looks like.

Then we work on workflows and agents. Think of an agent as an AI assistant with a particular job. Instead of asking a random question and hoping for a useful answer, you give it a role in work you actually need done. That might involve invoicing, preparing updates or gathering information that otherwise takes you away from something more valuable.

Here is a practical example from my own business. In a live workshop, I built a skill for my financial agent to check my QuickBooks records against information in my email, transcripts and computer. The task was to identify purchases that had not yet made it into QuickBooks and send the details to my bookkeeper.

In that demonstration, it sent an email flagging subscription purchases from the previous week. I had set it up as a Monday morning task. It was a working demonstration of one job in my own business. I still want to work with my bookkeeper. I want to do a better job of getting the information to them.

That is a useful way to think about where to begin. Look for a recurring job that is getting stuck. What information does it need? Where is that information now? What needs to reach another person so they can do their part? A real task gives you something concrete to build around.

You do not need prior AI expertise to come into GYFOS. We start with your work and what you would like to take off your plate. Some people have barely used these tools; others have already been experimenting. You can build at a pace that fits your goals without trying to match everybody else in the room.

The room matters too. There is real value in learning alongside other people, comparing ideas and seeing how someone else approaches a problem. People come for the technology and discover a peer group that helps them keep building. Agriculture is a big part of that community.

I also want to be clear about the point of all this. There is a life to live away from the computer. Time with the people you love matters. So does having room to look after yourself. The goal is to make useful space in your day, rather than fill every spare minute with another tool.




For more insight into Dan Aberhart’s perspective on preparing for the unexpected and protecting what matters most, watch his conversation with Tracy Brunet on the Impact Farming Show.
“Building an AI Operating System for Your Business.”