Should You Buy That Agricultural AI? Eight Questions Before You Sign

Artificial intelligence is marketed to farms as broadly transformative; however, adoption rates are uneven, and many promising pilot projects fail to become profitable. We argue that the deciding factor is rarely the algorithm but the fit between the tool and the conditions of its use. Four conditions predict that fit, and all four can be checked before money is committed. We turn them into an eight-question test, state its scoring rule, probe its sensitivity, apply it to four common vendor propositions, and release it as a free, offline instrument for farm and agribusiness managers. This version (v1.1) adds the paper's two companion instruments alongside the corrected PDF: The Reality Filter (reality-filter.html), the eight-question test as an offline browser instrument that runs entirely on the user's device and collects no data, and The Reality Filter Scorecard (reality-filter-scorecard.xlsx), the three-proposition comparison spreadsheet. Both implement the published scoring rule exactly, including the hard caps on Questions 1 and 3, the green-light veto, and the 11 and 6 thresholds; the four worked examples in the paper reproduce in both instruments. The PDF in this version carries the working-paper series identifier (Auctus Agri Working Paper AA 2026 005) and the corrected correspondence address; the text is otherwise unchanged from v1. The instruments are also distributed free at auctusagri.com/insights/reality-filter.html.