Agricultural Intelligence and Decision Assistant (AIDA)

AIDA (Agricultural Intelligence and Decision Assistant) is a research‑driven initiative that will put artificial intelligence at the service of Slovenian agriculture. The tool is being developed by the Jožef Stefan Institute together with partners from the DIH AGRIFOOD network to provide a reliable, Slovenian language assistant that can answer questions from farmers and agricultural advisors and offer transparent references to Slovenian legislation and best practices. At its core AIDA combines a large language model (LLM) with a retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) system – meaning that it can understand questions, retrieve authoritative documents and generate clear responses. By running locally on modest hardware (a single 24 GB GPU), it ensures data confidentiality and requires no connection to external cloud services.

Why AIDA?

• Expert answers based on Slovenian data – AIDA is designed specifically for the Slovenian agrifood sector. It draws on specialised agricultural literature, current legislation and good practice guidelines. This allows it to answer professional questions and provide context aware advice.
• Up‑to‑date knowledge of laws and regulations – because Slovenian agriculture is heavily regulated, AIDA’s document database includes the latest versions of relevant laws, regulations and rules. This ensures that answers reflect current compliance requirements.
• Built on open large language models – the system uses open‑access LLMs such as Google Gemma and the Slovenian‑tuned GaMS models. It also leverages open source RAG frameworks like Onyx and Kotaemon.
• Local deployment for data privacy – the assistant will run on local servers with relatively modest compute requirements (e.g., a single 24 GB GPU), so sensitive farm data never leaves the organisation.
• Legal foundation and open licensing – under Slovenia’s copyright law, research use of legally accessible works is permitted. The project plans to make the final model available under an open licence.

Data and learning

To become a competent agricultural advisor, AIDA is being trained on several types of data:

• Specialised and scientific literature – the model learns correct terminology and the nuances of Slovenian agricultural language from books, manuals, journals, theses and other literature.
• Legislation, regulations and guidelines – up‑to‑date legal texts are available thorugh RAG system so the assistant can reference them when answering questions.
• Curated question–answer sets – AIDA is trained using tens of thousands of question–answer pairs where each entry includes a question, a desired answer and the base model’s undesired answer. These sets include expert explanations, context‑dependent answers with source citations and safe refusals when insufficient context is provided. All training data are reviewed by humans before use.

The project team is also profiling future users through questionnaires and interviews to understand their tasks, tools, challenges and expectations. Two main user groups have been identified: farmers, who need quick and practical help in day‑to‑day situations, and agricultural advisors, who require reliable and professional assistance. Collecting feedback from both groups will ensure that AIDA delivers relevant, user‑centred support.

Synergy with the Slovenian AI Factory (SLAIF)

AIDA will be built on top of Slovenia’s rapidly evolving AI infrastructure. The Slovenian AI Factory (SLAIF) is a EuroHPC Joint Undertaking project that will deploy a new AI‑optimised supercomputer in Slovenia. The initiative is co‑funded by the EuroHPC and the Republic of Slovenia and will be hosted by IZUM in collaboration with the Jožef Stefan Institute, Arnes and several Slovenian universities. This supercomputer will deliver 10 exaflops of mixed‑precision AI performance and 100 petaflops for high‑performance computing tasks. Powered by renewable hydroelectric energy, it will provide a sustainable computing backbone for AI research and industry.

SLAIF is more than hardware; it is a dynamic ecosystem designed to unite Slovenia’s AI expertise across academia, industry and public institutions. It will offer access to pre‑trained AI models, sector‑specific support services and on‑campus facilities, making advanced AI resources available to businesses of all sizes. One of the sectors explicitly targeted by SLAIF is smart agriculture, where AI will be used to optimise energy systems, improve environmental monitoring and support sustainable farming. By leveraging SLAIF’s high‑performance computing power and AI ecosystem, AIDA will be able to train and run sophisticated models while remaining anchored in the local context.

AIDA’s role in the DIH AGRIFOOD ecosystem

As part of the DIH AGRIFOOD innovation hub, AIDA will complement existing applications such as My Farm, Digital Field Book and Benchmark Platform by providing an AI‑driven decision‑support layer. It will help farmers and advisors interpret data, understand regulations and make informed choices, thereby advancing the digital transformation of Slovenia’s agrifood sector.