Dell Technologies and Moyo, a digital business consultancy based in South Africa, have teamed up to introduce South African potato farmers to an autonomous drone that uses AI to detect potato leaf disease with impressive accuracy.

If you’re one of those farmers and thought South Africa’s agriculture sector could do with better crop health monitoring, that’s exactly what this solution promises to achieve. If you’re not a potato farmer, maybe read our review of the new iPhone 16 Pro instead, while the grown-ups put food on the shelves for you to buy.

You know what SA needs more of? Drones, that’s what.

In a sea of products and services with AI shoved in, this new AI-enabled development pursues meaningful change. We’re sure every other product or service will say the same thing but there’s a difference between this, and whatever they’re doing at [insert dumb example of AI].

Ensuring there is enough fresh food to go around seems like a meaningful change. Using an autonomous drone equipped with AI, farmers can enhance their agricultural surveillance which means timely interventions, reducing losses, and improving yield quality.

“The drone developed by Moyo employs a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system, combining high-resolution image capture with AI-based leaf pattern analysis. The neural network is trained to identify early disease signs, such as fungal infections, greatly enhancing the precision and depth of disease detection,” explains Dell in a press release.

The precision and depth of Moyo’s neural network, combined with Dell Precision AI-ready workstations with the NVIDIA accelerated computing platform, achieved a final accuracy rate of 99.52% after weeks of training. At least that’s how the press release tells it, anyway.