New Delhi, Feb. 16 -- Last week, Amul launched Sarlaben, an AI-powered digital assistant for dairy farmers in Gujarat. It will benefit over 3.6 million milk producers, most of them women, across more than 18,500 villages. Sarlaben answers queries on dairy farming, animal husbandry and milk procurement in real time, and is accessible through the Amul Farmer mobile app and via voice calls in Gujarati by those using basic feature phones.

The challenges were remarkable. The system must be able to understand farmers speaking Gujarati and local dialects, work amid intermittent connectivity in rural areas and give advice they can stake their livelihoods on. It draws from over 50 years of verified cooperative data, including 2 billion milk procu...