4 Ways Farmers Can Use AI to Avoid Falling Behind, According to Microsoft’s Top Ag Expert

Lisa Foust Prater | October 21, 2026
https://www.agriculture.com/4-ways-farmers-can-use-ai-to-avoid-falling-behind-according-to-microsoft-s-top-ag-expert-12186445

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a critical tool for farmers, and those who don’t embrace it will be left behind. That’s the message Ranveer Chadra shared today at the World Food Prize Norman E. Borlaug Dialogue in Des Moines, Iowa.

Chandra is the Vice President in M365 Copilot and the Chief Technology Officer of Agri-Food at Microsoft and the creator of Microsoft FarmBeats, a precision agriculture platform that combines IoT sensors, drones, satellite imagery, and AI to help farmers optimize resources such as water, soil, and pesticides.

He said farmers should be using AI applications in four ways:

1. Empower employees. “We are seeing farmers develop their own farmer assistant for every employee,” Chandra said. One task they are trained to do is identify crop pests and diseases from a photo, then offer advice for treatment.
2. Engage with customers. He said AI can help farmers share real-time information on crop forecasts with consumers and other parts of the value chain and help determine the best time to sell their crop.
3. Rethink business processes. Chandra said AI applications can use data to help farmers determine when to plant, irrigate, and harvest. See-and-spray technology also uses AI.
4. Create new technology. “This is the one I’m most passionate about,” Chandra said. “For example, farmers can do small field trials on the farm using AI.” Then, the application can be used to interpret and measure data in multiple ways.

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Growing Gap

Chandra said the success of farms in the future will be directly related to their progression with AI. In the drought-prone Baramati region of western India, he said, field trials conducted with the Indian Council of Agriculture Research showed farms using AI experienced around a 40% increase in yields and a 20% reduction in water consumption.

Still, he said, “there are very few farmers that have started using it.” Those in more developed regions of the world are more likely to adopt AI technology, he said, which is widening an already existing gap.

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Imperfect Technology

The affordability of AI technologies is a barrier, Chandra said. Users should also consider how their data is secured.

Another challenge is that the models used to train AI aren’t necessarily specific to agriculture. “For example, if a farmer in Africa asks a question, if they are given a response based on models that are trained in the U.S., they’re going to get an incorrect response,” he said. “We have to make sure these models are trained for farmers in their language, based on the constraints in which they operate.”

To combat misinformation, Chandra said advisers and extension agents were used to ask AI the farmers’ questions and convey the advice as appropriate. “We have to be mindful about where we are deploying any of these technologies and use the right approach to deliver [the information] to growers,” he said.

Regulations can also help, but agriculture needs to be part of the conversation. “When [countries] think of agriculture regulations, they should be doing it in combination with AI regulations,” Chandra said. “You want growers to get access to the latest AI tools. You don’t want them to be left behind. You want your scientists, your researchers to be using all the latest AI innovations.”

Chandra said the intention is for AI to assist people, not to replace them. “We are thinking of AI as a way to augment a farmer’s knowledge,” he said. “A lot of decisions they make are based on guesswork. Using AI, they can replace that guesswork with data, with intelligence. That is the future we are looking at: Can we empower every farmer everywhere in the world with data and AI to remove guesswork from their daily lives?”

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