Artificial Intelligence

This chapter covers one of the most omnipresent yet varied digital technologies, namely, artificial intelligence (AI). Although AI already helps describe and predict all types of situations, the AI future is quite unpredictable because this digital technology evolves extremely fast. Because AI has captured the interest and imagination of many people and organizations, this chapter explains in an accessible way the complex notion of AI and its technical background, without compromising the AI essentials. Although many AI applications exist (such as robotics, speech recognition, and recently generative AI with large language models, just to name a few), this chapter continues by zooming into a solution for agriculture as a success story. Overall, we invite the reader to learn more about the many possibilities but also pitfalls of AI. Because AI facilitates many other digital technologies, this chapter serves as a basis for the coming chapters as well.