New Delhi: The impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on agriculture is ‘phenomenal’, said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Monday. Sharing a video on social media platform X, Nadella highlighted the use of AI to increase the yield of a small farm in Maharashtra’s Baramati. The video demonstrates how AI-powered solutions are helping farmers optimise their resources and thus enhance productivity.
“The one example that I wanted to highlight was one of the small farmers who was part of the Baramati Co-op, where you can take this powerful technology but make it have an impact, where a small landowner is able to improve the yield of their land. And the numbers they shared in terms of reduction in chemicals, improvement in water usage, and ultimately, yield was phenomenal,” he said, in the video. Further, he also mentioned the use of geospatial data from drones and satellites which can help farmers in their own language.
“One of the things it does is sensor fusion. We’ve been talking about it for decades. This is using geospatial data, spatial-temporal data from drones, from satellites, from the soil, all getting connected in real-time and then to apply AI to it and then translate it back into knowledge for a farmer who is just asking questions in their vernacular language. That’s the stitching together is pretty phenomenal to see,” Nadella said.
Reacting to the video, Tesla and Space X founder Musk wrote, “AI will improve everything”.
In 2022, Microsoft launched a project on agri tech in Baramati, in collaboration with the Agricultural Development Trust (ADT), which is using AI tools to help farmers achieve healthy and sustainable harvests. The collaboration with Microsoft Research also aims to integrate AI, satellite imagery, and other tools to transform the farming sector.
Earlier, the Microsoft CEO admitted that one of his biggest mistakes was failing to predict the dominance of search, a market that Google successfully capitalised on.
He said Microsoft had initially assumed that the web would remain decentralised, not realising that search would become its most valuable business model.
Calling it a valuable lesson, he said: “We (Microsoft) missed what turned out to be the biggest business model on the web because we all assumed the web is all about being distributed.”