According to Tech Nation, investment in Artificial Intelligence reached record levels in the UK in 2019, making it the third biggest AI investor in the world. The last few years has seen AI and machine learning become must-have technologies for businesses across numerous industries, with AI use growing by 270% over the last four years, according to Leftronic. Many companies have therefore widely publicised the fact that they are investing in this area. However, 2020 may see the focus on the tech world shift away from AI, with the BBC reporting that the hype surrounding the technology could be dying down, approaching an "AI winter". Computer scientist Yoshua Bengio told the BBC that AI's capabilities had been "somewhat overhyped" over the last ten years, and Gary Marcus, a researcher at New York University, said that "real innovation" was needed for the technology to progress further.

Farmers spend nearly half of their operational budgets on agrochemicals such as herbicides and pesticides. Unfortunately, they usually apply these to entire fields at a time, which generates high chemical costs and decreases the efficacy of the chemicals. Such widespread application of chemicals harms the environment, endangers human health, and increases the likelihood of chem ical-resistance in weeds, pests, and diseases. And, even with that damaging widespread application, loss to weeds, pests and diseases can range from 20-50%. But manually scouting and sampling to determine the locations of these problems is time-consuming and costly, and cannot easily account for the enormous variety of factors that affect crops.