The Center for Artificial Intelligence Innovation (CAII) will join the Center for Digital Agriculture’s 2026 Conference on Generative AI in Agriculture, held March 9 at the iHotel and Illinois Conference Center. This year’s event highlights how large language models and other generative AI tools are reshaping agricultural research, productivity, and sustainability, with experts from academia and industry sharing emerging applications and challenges.
As part of the conference, CAII will host a table featuring live demonstrations of Illinois.chat, the University of Illinois’ secure, campus‑supported conversational AI platform. Illinois.chat provides researchers with a flexible environment for building domain‑specific AI tools, integrating data, and deploying interactive models for real‑world use. Its presence at the conference underscores CAII’s commitment to supporting responsible, research‑driven AI across disciplines.
As the official artificial intelligence (AI) software tool of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, it launched for the Fall 2025 semester and is available for anyone on campus. In partnership with the Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Illinois Computes, Illinois Chat is available to offer large language model (LLM) abilities to the entire campus community.
This campus-developed tool allows users to create personalized LLM-based chatbots – similar to commercial options like ChatGPT – but with more control over their functions and content, meaning more security and less risk. By utilizing their own data focused on their intended audience, users can implement Illinois Chat to act as a 24/7 teaching assistant for professors, scrape campus websites to find needed resources or help organize research data.
The partnership between CAII and the Center for Digital Agriculture is especially meaningful because CropWizard—a flagship CDA project for crop forecasting and decision support—is one of the first major research applications built entirely on the Illinois.chat platform. This collaboration demonstrates how generative AI can accelerate agricultural innovation by enabling researchers to rapidly prototype, test, and deploy intelligent tools that support farmers, scientists, and policymakers.
By participating in the 2026 CDA Conference, CAII aims to strengthen connections between AI researchers and the agricultural community, highlight the potential of campus‑developed AI infrastructure, and showcase how platforms like Illinois.chat can power the next generation of digital agriculture solutions. As interest in generative AI continues to grow, this collaboration offers a model for how interdisciplinary partnerships can translate advanced computing into practical impact.