Bayer has announced the pilot of an expert GenAI system to benefit farmers and up-level agronomists in their daily work. The company has been using proprietary agronomic data to train a large language model (LLM) with years of internal data, insights from thousands of trials within its vast testing network, and centuries of aggregated experience from Bayer agronomists around the world.
Developed in collaboration with Microsoft as leading technology partner and Ernst & Young 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, Managing Director, Research for Industry & 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 news release
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