InfoAg 2019 - embracing the diversity and riding the wave

This year's InfoAg2019 had 1200 attendees from 20 countries, demonstrating that no matter the weather (the season with the flood, delayed crop and other setbacks), the industry is marching forward, into the age of digital revolution. Here are some of my takeaways.

Newcomers accepted

Agtech implies diversity. Diversity of approaches, of thought, of technologies, and diversity of benefits. With the need for cloud computing, connectivity and "instant processing" to make data truly actionable, agtech is coming to rely and depend on providers outside of the industry, like Microsoft and Amazon, understanding the needs of users in agriculture.

First, they were seen as unwanted newcomers. Now the industry is embracing the need for people with horizontal, e.g. cloud computing, data processing and connectivity, expertise to join forces with vertical expertise (agronomy, soil science, phenotyping) in the agricultural domain, to breed the best solutions for the industry.

The emergence of new models like Microsoft's FarmBeats lead by @Ranveer Chandra, or even our own analytics engine FluroSense (backed by Microsoft M12) is raising interest and is being received with more openness, as users encounter the problems that the technology can solve for them at scale. Such problems include the "data flood", the data "silos" and their incompatibility, leading to inability to perform holistic analysis across the data sources.

Interoperability is a must

It's a known history of agricultural technology, especially the Farm Management Systems (FMS), like Proagrica, Agrian, Agworld etc) that they were built for a specific market, for specific players in the supply chain. The times have changed and those technologies got a makeover, and are now serving a broader range of customers solving a wider spectrum of problems. Yet, it is not possible to find "all in one platform", and if you could, you would be inundated by its complexity! [A point to remember when a customer asks you to build it].

What is the agtech answer to the need for comperhensive but specialised solutions?

Interoperability and partnerships.

Partnerships rule

At @FluroSat we are glad to find ourselves being joined by more and more people who start to talk about partnerships and are working on building APIs. And I am not talking about customer one-to-one integrations. I am talking about publishing an API as an open contract, that partners can sign up for, and which will be maintained by a company across products and geographies. It's an API to enable your rapidly stitched drone data going straight into your analytics engine, it is about the VR recommendation being sent directly to the tractor you picked in the field, - in short, it is about truly making life easier by connecting the technology "on the back-end" to save the users time and nerves.

Customers get creative

It is fantastic to see the early adopters turning into evangelists of the technology. We are obsessed with our customers' needs, and making their daily decision-making workflows simpler, faster, more enjoyable. It is not easy to simultaneously develop a new way of doing things, the automation around it and deliver it on thousands of acres within a split second. There are obvious limitations that are in the way - from data transfer, and compute time to simply the fact that technology takes time to build.

It is our honour to work with the customers on the cutting edge and be trusted with the real, big problems, to hear that we are solving them, and be asked, be demanded, be expected to deliver our solutions to those problems.

Our job as innovators is incredibly demanding and extremely rewarding.

We owe to the early adoptors - they are the ones leading the industry into #Ag4.0.

Customer experience is an industry-agnostic

The customers in agtech are now expecting the tech to go from good to great in the next season and demonstrate the same leap the season after. They recognise that everything takes time and they are ready to invest it, but they are used to technologies like mobile phones updating every year, and it becomes a general expectation of them as a consumer.

Customers want us, the agtech industry, to continue to innovate and are happy to support the innovation by providing feedback, data input, and guidance on building usable profitable solutions that can make them and their agribusinesses more successful. It is our job to deliver on our promise to the industry, which is becoming more open to innovation.

And remember, there are no #shortcuts to creating #value.

For more background on the InfoAg2019, check a podcast with the conference organiser on AgWired: http://agwired.com/2019/07/26/zimmcast-622-future-of-infoag-conference/