This week’s edition looks at the Sensei Ag debacle. But before we get there, let us get through some announcements.
Announcements
- SFTW Convos will return on Wednesday with my conversation with Michael Stern, ex-CEO of The Climate Corporation, post its acquisition by Monsanto. We have heard David Friedberg’s side of the story in his interview with Louisa Burwood-Taylor two years ago. This conversation will shed some light on Monsanto’s perspective on the acquisition, what worked and what didn’t. Ask your friends and colleagues to subscribe, if they want to get this in their Inbox on Wednesday.
- Most enterprise GenAI projects get stuck in proof-of-concept land. SFTW released a white paper on Wednesday, which provides a practical guide on how to break through the POC wall with case studies from four different organizations. You can get the free white paper here: “POC to OMG! The Realities of Deploying GenAI at the Farm Gate”
- I will be chairing the opening fireside chat at the pre-summit at World Agritech “AI in agriculture forum” on March 10th.
- I will be chairing the “AI / GenAI: Transforming Legacy Industries to Improve Customer Outcomes” breakout session on March 11th at the World Agritech Summit with Pratik Desai (Kissan AI), Sachi Desai (Bayer), and Rikin Gandhi (Digital Green)
Sensei farms
A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported “Larry Ellison’s Half-Billion-Dollar Quest to Change Farming Has Been a Bust” (paywalled article)
His Sensei Ag company hasn’t succeeded in boosting output and nutrition in its greenhouses with AI, robotics and software.
Larry Ellison is a famous technology entrepreneur and billionaire, who is the Executive Chairman of Oracle and its CTO. He was instrumental in bringing Oracle database technology to the market. Interestingly enough, his Wikipedia page did not have any mention of farming or agriculture among his many activities.
He has spent $ 500 million (according to WSJ), which I guess is not a large amount for someone to go and modify their Wikipedia page. So I went ahead and edited his page and added a very short paragraph about his interest in farming. (Hopefully the change will stick, though with LLM technology, the importance of Wikipedia is going down/has gone down.)
The story has definitely had a strong reaction within the AgTech community. The reactions have been typical and not very surprising. Here is a paraphrased example of a reaction.
Tech bros believe they can solve all problems with technology, while innovation comes from experienced people.
This is the absolutely wrong lesson to learn from the Sensei Ag experience. This is an “us vs. them” attitude, which is not helpful at all.
It completely misses how innovation happens.
Innovation requires capital, domain expertise, human resources, right business, GTM, and distribution models, a lot of patience, and some amount of luck.
In the US, only 1-2% of the population is involved in farming and agriculture. It is extremely naive and dangerous to expect that all innovation has to and can only come from the 1-2% of the population.
There are innumerable examples of people from outside a given industry who will come in with a new perspective, a fresh pair of eyes, fresh capital (this is especially important, when the overall funding is down in AgTech), new skills and a new approach to solve a particular problem. They obviously need to work with and learn from people who have domain expertise to get a deeper understanding of the problems.
This is a cliched example but it is relevant - Henry Ford and “faster horses” and all that.
The word Sensei means a “teacher”, especially in a martial arts context.
Image generated by ChatGPT: “A Sensei (teacher) teaching about growing lettuce and tomatoes in a greenhouse”
Yes, Larry Ellison probably burnt through $ 500 million on this project. But what can we learn from the Sensei Ag experience? (Sensei Ag still continues to be a food business with operations in Ontario, Canada and Lanai).