12 NEBRASKA CATTLEMAN January 2026 THE OTHER AI Artificial Intelligence and What It Means for the Beef Industry TRESSA LAWRENCE | CONTRIBUTING WRITER For years in the agricultural industry, when someone has referenced “AI,” they have probably been referring to artificial insemination. As we sit on the precipice of what could be the next great revolution in technology, we find ourselves asking the clarifying question, “When you say ‘AI,’ are you talking about artificial insemination or artificial intelligence?” If you were to ask ChatGPT what the definition of artificial intelligence (AI) is, it would tell you that AI is “The field of computer science concerned with creating systems capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. These tasks include things like learning from data, reasoning, solving problems, understanding language, recognizing patterns, perceiving the environment and making decisions. In simpler terms, AI is about building machines that can think or act intelligently.” While that definition is straightforward, what does that mean for you as a member of the beef industry? Over the last five years or so, we have seen the emergence of AI in feedlot and dairy technology. Now we are seeing it spread into our everyday lives. “We can think of AI as machine learning or deep learning. Machine learning is a form of statistical analysis where you can draw inferences about very complex relationships that are difficult to detect,” explains Elliott Dennis, Ph.D., associate professor of agricultural economics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). “It’s essentially a way to make sense of very, very, very messy, complicated and interconnected data.” AI is trained through data collection, which can look like a lot of different things. Some AI is trained by uploading text or numerical data, and some is trained by uploading images and audio. All data is filtered and organized so that the AI model can learn patterns from it. Language-model AI, such as ChatGPT, is trained with billions of examples of texts so that it can mimic human writing through correct grammar and reasoning skills. From those texts, the chat retains all of that information to quickly give answers when asked a question. “We are in the digital age, and we’re collecting a lot of data already. In my opinion, the most valuable point of AI is that it allows the agriculture systems to take thousands of small data points, whether it’s images, sensor readings or whatever you’re measuring, that has the ability to build algorithms and turn them into something meaningful and timely for producers to make better management decisions,” says Yijie Xiong, assistant professor and precision livestock management Extension specialist at UNL. Whether we realize it or not, AI is no longer a technology reserved for university researchers and large companies; we are now finding AI in the technology that we can access from our own homes or carry around in our pockets. Pros As an industry that often struggles to find willing and competent labor, AI has the potential to streamline jobs and increase efficiency throughout all sectors of the beef industry. Readers in the feedlot sector are probably familiar with technology used for precision livestock monitoring. Real-time data is collected via sensors and electronic identification (EID) tags, and is used to monitor animals, learn their behavior and then train their AI algorithms to recognize patterns. When the pattern changes, it can be a potential indicator that the animal is getting sick days before physical symptoms may present themselves. This eliminates the need to have eyes on the cattle at all times. By implementing AI technology into cattle herd manChatGPT is an example of language-model artificial intelligence that you can access from your own computer or phone, and can be helpful in your day-to-day operation. PRODUCTION
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTMxNTA5