Bayer announced the launch of a pilot for its GenAI system, aimed at benefiting farmers and enhancing agronomists' daily work.
“Our unique GenAI system has the potential to serve agronomists and benefit farmers all over the world, further advancing AI as an indispensable technology for agriculture,” said Amanda McClerren, CIO for Bayer’s Crop Science Division. “We’ll continue to use traditional AI to develop better products, and we’re also committed to harnessing new GenAI technology in a thoughtful way that augments and supports knowledgeable experts across the industry, bringing value to farmers and those who serve them.”
By leveraging proprietary agronomic data, insights from thousands of trials, and centuries of aggregated experience, Bayer has developed an expert system capable of swiftly answering queries related to agronomy, farm management, and Bayer agricultural products. Validated by agronomists, the pilot is already boosting productivity for Bayer teams in the United States, outperforming existing LLMs in the agricultural market.
Developed in collaboration with Microsoft as leading technology partner and Ernst & Young (EY) as an industry partner, Bayer is exploring ways to integrate the expert GenAI system into its digital offerings, and the company anticipates broad opportunities for collaboration with other agricultural offerings and partners. Designed as a global capability, the tool will benefit millions of smallholder farmers in the future by democratizing access to agronomic advice and product information critical to feeding communities and improving global food security.
“AI and automation are helping farms of all sizes produce more while using fewer natural resources, and we're starting to see how they can enhance decision-making on almost any plot of land,” said Ranveer Chandra, CTO, Agri-Food at Microsoft. “With Bayer's strengths in data science, digital, and especially agronomic expertise, we're pleased to be contributing to an expert system that will make agronomic understanding more accessible and empower those responsible for feeding the planet.”
Bayer aims to expand the pilot of the expert GenAI system to selected agronomists and potentially farmers as early as this year, while continuing to advance a separate GenAI prototype allowing users to directly query their own farm data. Because they also pull insights from closed data sets, these GenAI tools are unique for agriculture and will bring more meaningful value to farmers, agronomists and other industry users, compared to out-of-the-box LLMs that only use open-source data.
Bayer also announced advancements in its strategic partnership with Microsoft, introducing AgPowered Services to the agri-food industry. Bayer® Historical Weather, integrated with Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, offers comprehensive weather insights spanning the last 40 years. Additionally, Bayer is developing a connector with Lindsay Corporation to access irrigation data, expanding data types available to Azure Data Manager's enterprise customers.
Jeremy Williams, Head of Digital Farming for Bayer’s Crop Science Division, emphasized the importance of digital technology in adapting to the evolving agricultural landscape.
“With our AgPowered Services, we are making access to digital tools easy and convenient, benefiting the industry and driving innovation,” said Williams. “There is both a tremendous opportunity and a pressing need for digital technology to better serve farmers and the industry, and we aim to achieve this by enabling the cloud-connected acre.”