An artificial intelligence platform built around agricultural trade data is seeking to help small farmers, suppliers and exporters reach international buyers, addressing information barriers that can make entering new markets difficult for smaller businesses.
Hoshik Shin, whose company Tridge operates the platform, said the business had spent almost five years developing a structured database of agricultural products, prices, suppliers and quality standards before expanding its AI capabilities.
The platform covers 300,000 stock-keeping units in agricultural products and 11 million in food products, Shin said during a panel discussion at a summit in Seoul. He said the company had attracted more than 1 million users through publicly accessible data, which helped it build a customer base without relying heavily on marketing.
Shin said the platform was designed to make it easier for smaller suppliers and exporters to connect with large international buyers, using its data and network to support market discovery and sales.
The company’s approach points to a potential commercial application for AI in emerging markets, where limited access to market information can constrain small businesses seeking to expand beyond domestic customers.
Shin said agricultural trade data was difficult to organise when the company began its work, with no consistent structure for defining product specifications, packaging requirements and quality standards across markets.
Building that foundation was essential to the platform’s expansion, he said. The availability of greater cloud computing capacity after the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022 also helped the company develop software better suited to enterprise customers.
Rather than relying solely on AI models, the business combines technology with accumulated product data and a network of users and suppliers. Shin said this allowed the platform to function as a sales agent for businesses seeking customers in international markets.
He described the model as particularly relevant for smaller agricultural producers and exporters that may lack the resources to develop overseas sales networks independently.
Shin said government export-promotion programmes often rely on trade exhibitions, official visits and other efforts to introduce domestic businesses to foreign buyers. Such programmes can be difficult to measure and may take time to produce results, he said.
He argued that digital platforms could help make export development more directly measurable by connecting suppliers with potential buyers and supporting new sales opportunities.
Tridge wants to work with the World Bank to increase awareness of its services among farmers and small and medium-sized businesses, Shin said. He also suggested that governments could use such platforms to improve the efficiency of their export-promotion spending.
Those measures would help establish how effectively AI-driven trade platforms translate improved access to information into higher export volumes and incomes.
For agricultural businesses, the commercial test is whether technology can turn better market information into new customers, stronger sales and sustained participation in international trade.
