“Instead of showing data, it thinks about your data”

In most indoor farms today, growers are staring at dashboards full of data. Temperatures, humidity, CO2 readings, alert after alert, with little explanation of what is causing the problem or what to do about it. Hamza Qadoumi, Founder and CEO of Ecobloom Technologies, has spent years watching this pattern repeat. “Current dashboards are observation tools, not decision tools,” he told attendees at CEAIF 2026‘s first day. “They answer what, but never why, or what’s next.”

Qadoumi framed the industry’s monitoring history in three stages. The first is manual data collection, where growers walk rows with handheld devices and log readings on paper. The second, where most of the industry sits today, is digital dashboards with threshold alerts. More sophisticated, but still reactive. An alarm goes off, a grower checks the screen, guesses at the cause, tries something, and waits, often for days, by which point the damage is already done. The third generation, around which EcoSense is built, works differently. “Instead of showing data, it thinks about your data,” Qadoumi said. “The difference here is intelligence, not so much speed.”

© Ecobloom

In practice, this means I.V.A. catches stress and disease up to ten days before a grower walking the rows would spot anything wrong. It tracks vegetation indices on a per-plant basis, flags anomalies early, and cross-references visual signals with climate conditions and forecast data to arrive at a root cause. From there, it produces a step-by-step action plan. “That’s reasoning, not reporting,” Qadoumi said.

© Ecobloom

Grower still holds the wheel
A beta layer currently in testing takes this further, connecting I.V.A. directly to a facility’s climate control systems, adjusting irrigation, lighting, shading, and windows based on its recommendations, with grower confirmation at each step. Qadoumi was careful to frame what that relationship looks like in practice, reaching for an analogy that landed clearly with the audience. “It’s like autonomous vehicles. The steering wheel is not really necessary, but it’s there because you have to kind of go through this process of trusting the car, but also being in somewhat of control, just in case. You are always in control in case you need to take over the steering wheel.”