Communicating Agriculture AI Technologies: How American Agricultural Producers’ Perception of Trustworthiness, Risk Perception, and Emotion Affect Their Likelihood of Adopting Artificial Intelligence in Food Systems

ABSTRACT

The recent decade has witnessed a rise in novel agriculture AI technologies in the USA to improve productivity and sustainability in food systems. However, there lacks scholarship that investigates how agricultural producers, one of the most important stakeholders in this technological development, perceive the risks of and their trustworthiness in these emerging technologies. We addressed this knowledge gap by surveying a diverse producer population across the United States (N = 132). We found a positive association between producers’ trustworthiness and their likelihood of adopting certain emerging technologies. Moreover, the more these producers feel a technology is worth the various costs, the higher likelihood they will adopt the technology. These findings provide practical lessons for how to communicate novel food production technologies to this crucial stakeholder and how to implement a user-centered technology design.

KEYWORDS:

• AI
• trustworthiness
• risk perception
• emotion
• technology adoption
• agriculture
• public opinion

Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Professor Jingyi Huang and Professor Victor E. Cabrera from the University of Wisconsin-Madison for putting us in contact with producers to conduct our survey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by U.S. Department of Agriculture: [Grant Number AAJ8358].