Explaining the uses of AI, Prof Sloan said a farmer growing plants in fields needed to check for pests.
“Go back even 10 years, you would have had to manually go around and actually look at all of those plants,” he said.
“Now what you can do, is you can take a machine… you can scan individually, you can compare what you’re seeing very quickly to what a healthy plant looks like.”
He said it was the same with animals, adding: “A cow can tell you by the way it walks, the way it sits, how it spends its time, whether it’s OK or not OK.”
It took time and experience for a person to check them, he said, but with cameras, “we can spot them, we can see them, and we can act really quickly to keep the animals healthy”.