Vision to Venture: Saad Ansari
- Gulmina Azam
- Jan 3, 2019
- 2 min read
On 28th December 2018, National Incubation Centre, Islamabad hosted an event, The Entrepreneur Enterprise: Vision to Venture by Saad Ansari with their guest speaker being Saad Ansari, co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Connecterra.
Connecterra is Artificial Intelligence based company that specializes in creating food sustainability. Saad Ansari had come in that evening to talk about Connecterra’s latest technology, Ida. Ida is an ‘intelligent dairy farming assistant’.
“We thought what if you take a computer program and teach it to help a farmer, think like a farmer or act like a farmer’s assistant. We came up with the concept of Ida.” Saad continued, “You can consider IDA the Siri or Alexa of farming.”
Connecterra’s team saw the decrease in younger people joining the farming workforce, the high rate of suicide among farmers, climate change caused by farming, and food shortages around the world and decided it was reason enough to develop a program that helps tackle those problems.
“Ida tells the farmer when the cows are sick, when the cows are going to sleep, when they need to give birth and when they’re stressed.”
Ida works by tracking the behavior of the cows, depending on farmer’s feedback, using management software and predicting the weather since weather has an effect on the behavior of cows.
Founded in 2014, Connecterra now operates in 9 countries including Pakistan, The Netherlands and Belgium. Saad took a slight detour from the technicalities to tell his audience about his company’s beginning.
“We started with a little more than a PowerPoint presentation and a tracker prototype.” He further elaborated, “We you start out you trying to prove your idea, prove the product market and whether your concept is actually going to fly or not.”
Saad then talked about the problems that come with introducing technology to farmers.
“You’ve got a sixth generation farmer and you’re saying ‘I can do your job better than you’ so really have to build that trust.”
Since the company operates in 9 countries, each country comes with its own set of problems.
“Cow biology is the same everywhere but you have logistical differences, psychological difference, and of course psychometric differences: how does the farmer think,” explained Saad. “But you start small and then solve your problems one by one.”
While answering questions, Saad shared his experience about working in his own startup as opposed to a job in someone else’s company.
“In a startup you build something, somebody likes it and then you break it and fix it and pretty soon you have a prototype that’s barely working and it takes up.”
While a lot of Connecterra’s workings were such that could only be easily understood by those in the AI industry, the audience seemed intrigued with the concept of Ida. With an economy based on raw materials like milk and meat, Ida seems like a pertinent idea to bring to the country.
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