Welcome to the 53rd Edition of Upstream Ag Professional!
Agribusiness earnings for Q2 have begun to be released, including from CNH Industrial, AGCO, FMC, BASF and Corteva. Next week Bayer, Mosaic, Nutrien and others will be released so expect the Upstream Ag Professional Q2 2024 Agribusiness Earnings Themes, Highlights and Analysis to be released next week.
The Q1 2024 edition has been the most read Upstream article of 2024.
Index
AgVend Unveils ‘Goose’: The first AI co-pilot built for ag retail
Innovation Theatre: Shackles to Progress in Agribusiness
Leaf Agriculture raises $11.3M in Series A Funding
CNH Industrial Q2 2024 Results and Changes to Global Leadership Team
ICL Continues Expanding Its Specialty Plant Nutrition Footprint in North America
Serious Doubts About Alternatives to Nitrogen Fertilizer
Defining biostimulants in the next farm bill and the importance of nomenclature
Hyper-Focus as an AgTech Startup with Lumo’s Founder & CEO, Devon Wright
Regenerative Agriculture Corner
Don’t Mimic Nature on the Farm, Improve it
What is Regenerative Agriculture
Regenerative Agriculture Doesn't Have to Be Contentious
Upstream LLM Search Functionality
Nike: An Epic Saga of Value Destruction
Other Interesting Ag Articles (4 this week)
Thank you for your continued support of Upstream!
1. AgVend Unveils ‘Goose’: The first AI co-pilot built for ag retail - Upstream Ag Professional
Key Takeaways
AgVend has introduced Goose, an AI co-pilot designed to enhance the efficiency of ag retail teams. The AI tool aims to automate tasks and provide actionable insights, allowing agronomists and grain merchandisers to focus on higher-value activities.
Goose is integrated into AgVend's existing platform at no additional cost, emphasizing the company's commitment to delivering value through technology.
AgVend plans to expand Goose’s functionality overtime. This could include predictive forecasting, demand generation, inventory management, and more. This feature set positions AgVend to collaborate with major agribusinesses to add more data and augment the co-pilot functionality.
AgVend, the leading provider of digital enablement solutions for agribusiness, announces the launch of Goose, an innovative AI co-pilot designed to transform the way ag retail teams go to market. This latest addition serves as a free enhancement to their existing platform underscores AgVend’s commitment to deliver technology that enables agronomy sellers, grain merchandisers, and energy sales reps to do their best work.
The genAI space is continuing to grow within the agriculture industry, with dozens of companies having announced a product or launched a product to the market:
Note: I think in the future an image likes this will be irrelevant because every entity will offer their own, or white-label a system in the future. It’s almost like making an image in 1998 of all the ag companies that have websites— not all had at the time, but today every single company has one. Thanks to Bailey Stockdale of Leaf Agriculture for his help in identifying other companies to add to the image.
Control Points, Agribusiness Software and GenAi Interfaces
Businesses want a single point of action across their company. They don’t want ten different softwares; they want one.
The way to become the “one” is to own a control point.
If a software company doesn’t own the control point, they will struggle with adoption, stickiness and value creation over time making them more prone to being displaced.
A Control Point is the most important application in a software customer’s feature suite. It is the last software users turn off at the end of the day or the first one they look at in the morning. Some might refer to this as a core operating system.
There are typically only one or two control points in any segment: one in the front office that touches the customer and drives sales, and one in the back office for operations and management.
In the world of large-scale row crop farming in North America, the most influential groups tend to be the retail input providers and the grain originators— these are also the entities where transactions occur either to purchase inputs or services or for a farmer to be paid for their grain.
From the early 2010’s into the early 2020’s, many in the industry thought the control point was agronomic software— but it’s not.
In the value chain, farmers work closely with grain origination companies, retailers and dealers, and the control point for those entities is not agronomic software or farm management software— it is the transactional and financial software driving the day-to-day commerce functions of the ordering, invoicing, CRM, contracting grain etc.
On top, those entities back office needs/management needs, aren’t typically connected to agronomic software, but they are to the transactional softwares, like grain merchandising software or ERPs for example.
The organizational workflow builds around the control point.
The company that owns the control point can layer on other software, more functionality, and is best positioned to win and accrue value. A control point software is difficult to displace and is the point where value for the customers and returns for the investor, stem from.
AgVend owns the transactional control point and therefore the workflow of ag retail staff.
Control Points are important to consider in the context of generativeAI interfaces and functionality.
Owning a control point and adding incremental functionality ties into the GenAI co-pilot teaser AgVend released, too: Goose.
Goose is being positioned to tackle many of the administrative aspects of an ag retail professionals day-to-day:
Goose serves as a personalized partner in the field, identifying insights and automating tedious tasks. An agronomist can ask Goose, “Who are my largest urea buyers from the past three years that haven’t booked this fall?” Or a merchandiser can prompt it to “Draft a text message for grain prospects updating them on the recent market changes.” While Goose can act on one’s behalf, users have full control of any actions taken.
AgVend is one of the best positioned entities in the industry to deploy genAI co-pilot functionality in this way because of that control point ownership.
The functionality is currently in beta with some customers and will be available to all AgVend customers by the end of 2024.
In a previous conversation with co-founder and CEO Alexander Reichert, he mentioned two other important points:
The functionality is focused on agribusiness staff today, not the farmer users. The primary function is for the agribusiness staff to look up information about customers, about product availability, generate marketing emails/texts etc.
The offering does not currently have voice functionality, but is expected to be available later on this year.
Pricing
Goose functionality will NOT include an incremental fee to their ag retailer customers.
That pricing structure is worth dissecting more.
