MIT Sloan Management Review Research Report on Achieving Individual - and Organizational - Value With AI

At Land O’Lakes, a member-owned cooperative agribusiness, farmers are using data and artificial intelligence to make smarter decisions. Over the past 30 years, corn farmers have used advances in bioengineering, chemicals, and analytics to boost their average yields by 50%, from 120 to 180 bushels per acre. Those advances pale in contrast to future corn yields that will be made possible using data and AI: Demonstrations promise to triple that average — to 540 bushels per acre — by the end of this decade. Farmers don’t have to wait that long to see some of those benefits, however. Through extensive experimentation and complex algorithms, Land O’Lakes is already providing AI-driven recommendations to help individual farmers become more productive.

But AI systems aren’t telling farmers exactly what to do: Every piece of land differs; every local market differs. Instead, the cooperative offers detailed recommendations to improve the decisions individual farmers make. These include:

• Placing the right seed in the right soil at the right density while incorporating long-term weather forecasts.
• Applying nitrogen at the appropriate rate and at the most optimal time frame, saving costs and increasing plant uptake.
• Implementing the right farming practices (e.g., tilling, cover crops) to increase soil health, sequester carbon, and drive equal or higher yields compared to prior outputs.
• Using computer vision to identify weeds and diseases and to apply the right amount of crop protection in the required spots.

Teddy Bekele, CTO of Land O’Lakes, says that farmers are “making decisions rather than following a recipe.” That is, they are no longer adhering to age-old family traditions about how to cultivate the land, nor are they blindly following AI recommendations. Farmers are forging their own paths — better informed, but still independent.

About the Author

Sam Ransbotham is a professor of analytics at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, as well as guest editor for MIT Sloan Management Review’s Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy Big Ideas initiative.

David Kiron is the editorial director for research at MIT Sloan Management Review and program lead for its Big Ideas research initiatives. Previously, he was a senior researcher at Harvard Business School and a researcher at the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. He is coauthor of the forthcoming book Workforce Ecosystems: Reaching Strategic Goals With People, Partners, and Technology (MIT Press, 2023).

François Candelon is a senior partner and managing director at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the global director of the BCG Henderson Institute. He can be contacted at candelon.francois@bcg.com.

Shervin Khodabandeh is a senior partner and managing director at BCG and the coleader of GAMMA, a part of BCG X, in North America. He can be contacted at shervin@bcg.com.

Michael Chu is a partner and associate director at BCG, and a core member of GAMMA, a part of BCG X. He can be reached at chu.michael@bcg.com.

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