Moyo, a South African digital business consultancy, has partnered with Dell Technologies to develop an autonomous drone using AI to detect potato leaf disease, aiding the country’s agriculture sector with advanced crop health monitoring.
The innovative Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA solution combines NVIDIA’s cutting-edge AI infrastructure and NVIDIA Enterprise AI software with industry-leading Dell computing, storage, networking, workstations, and laptops. All of this is achievable thanks to NVIDIA’s fast Spectrum-X Ethernet networking fabric. Moyo employed the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA, which combines Dell and NVIDIA AI technologies, to incorporate AI models and frameworks into its operations.
AI has a huge potential to assist in resolving some of the most pressing issues facing our planet. Agricultural surveillance can be improved by AI to enable prompt interventions, lower losses, and higher quality yields.  Using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology, Moyo’s drone combines AI-based leaf pattern analysis with high-resolution image acquisition. By training it to recognize early disease indicators like fungal infections, the neural network significantly improves the accuracy and depth of disease detection.
Moyo collaborates with clients to develop AI solutions and strategies that enable them to achieve measurable and actionable business outcomes.
“For companies using AI, having a reliable partner and high-performance technology is crucial. Dell Technologies has been a leading player in the AI space, offering the industry’s broadest portfolio of solutions designed specifically for AI workloads. This expertise was crucial in creating the drone AI model and will continue to be as we create other AI-driven solutions that can support South Africa’s agriculture sector,” said Philip Heydenrych, Director, Moyo. 
Dell Precision AI-ready workstations with the NVIDIA accelerated computing platform, which includes NVIDIA AI Enterprise software for the development and deployment of secure, production-grade generative AI applications, allowed Moyo to run GenAI testing and quickly turn applications into real world solutions. By driving model training as an efficient NVIDIA AI Workbench project, a final accuracy rate of 99.52% was achieved in two weeks.
Dell Precision workstations also include high-performance Intel Xeon processors, super-fast memory, and NVIDIA RTX professional graphics. Dell Precision Optimizer software optimizes these components to provide best performance for crop monitoring applications. This configuration enables the processing of massive datasets while also managing sophisticated algorithms in the backend. This data processing and algorithm output is critical for understanding crop health and growth patterns.
“By leveraging the potential of AI and cutting-edge technologies, we are collaborating with our customers to foster innovation and drive positive impact for business, people, and the planet. With Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA, Moyo now has their own sandbox environment for GenAI experiments and Proof of Concept projects and can quickly turn applications into real world solutions,” said Chris Buchanan, Client Solutions Director, Dell Technologies South Africa.The post South African Consultancy Partners with Dell for AI Drone first appeared on IT News Africa | Business Technology, Telecoms and Startup News.