AGCO is “All In” When It Comes to Farm Tech

During January I had the very great privilege of attending two excellent, and eye-opening, technology events: the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas and AGCO’s iVenture Summit in Berlin.  In some ways, the events couldn’t have been more different—CES has 170,000 attendees each year and is focused on consumer technology, while iVenture had 300 ag industry leaders focused on ag technologies—but there was a lot of thematic overlap, and a lot to take away from each for AGCO.

Internet of Everything

CES was interesting because there was much more focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and autonomy than in the past, with much less emphasis on certain other business segments like drones and video.  Also interesting was how the AI, IoT, and autonomy business segments are starting to blur together as technology from each is becoming more and more important to the value proposition of the others.  The output of these segments is also starting to blur the edges of application in different industries.  From automotive, to trucking, to mining, to home appliances, and agriculture, we are all facing similar challenges of how to pull value from these promising technologies.  Some estimates put the number of tracked objects in the IoT at over a billion in 2 years, so it seems we are all in this together.

Technology on the Farm

The first ever AGCO iVenture Summit in Berlin brought together leaders from the ag industry, including venture capital firms, start up companies, government officials, and senior leaders from not only AGCO, but also Baywa, Bayer, and Rabobank.  The exchange of ideas was rewarding for all participants.  Like CES, we saw plenty of technology related to AI, IoT, and autonomy.  iVenture is about solving ag problems, though, so we went beyond the tech and saw businesses focused on connecting farmers to each other, connecting farmers to markets, and driving market efficiency into the ag value chain.  Innovation came not only from technology and not only geared to high tech farmers, but also from innovative business models and geared to smallholders.

Enhancing Productivity, Efficiency and Profitability

My key takeaway from these events was that AGCO is on the right track technologically.  As I look at what the highest technology companies in the world are working on in other industries, we are analogous.

• We want to understand how customers use and manage our products as key productivity assets.
• We want to use AI, IoT, and autonomy to help customers make better decisions and work more efficiently.
• We want to use technology to transform our industry.
• We want to leverage best-in-class partnerships to bring cutting-edge solutions to our customers.

When I look at the start up community in ag, I can see that there are small companies moving fast that we can work with to gain an advantage over our competition.  I can see the investment community putting more and more money into technologies that we have been working on for years.  And I can see that AGCO is emerging as a clear leader in the field, helping to set a vision and direction for where ag tech will go.

Conferences can be hit or miss, but CES and iVenture were invigorating and educational. I have no doubt that our participation will lead to profit for AGCO in the future.

Written by: Stefan Caspari

Stefan Caspari is the Vice President of Fuse^® Connected Services and Technologies at AGCO. To learn more about the Fuse technology strategy, visit www.AGCOtechnologies.com/About-Fuse.