On May 20, 2026, we kicked off the series Transforming Agriculture with AI which is a monthly, public-facing dialogue produced by IAAI in partnership with AGX AI. Each session connects researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working to advance AI capabilities and field-ready solutions for smallholder farmers across Africa, Asia, and beyond. Community input shapes the research agenda — and findings flow back as real, actionable insights.
This first session tackled a question central to everything we do: how do we measure whether AI tools actually work in the field? We explored the current state of benchmarking for agricultural AI — the gaps, the trust challenges, and what it would take to build standards that are genuinely useful across contexts and geographies.
Panelists included model builders, dataset creators, and delivery organizations working directly with smallholder farmers:
- Stewart Collis, The Gates Foundation
- Professor Monojit Choudhury, Institute for Agriculture and Artificial Intelligence (IAAI)
- Vikram Adve, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Sachi Desai, Bayer Crop Science
- Niriksha Shetty, Precision Development (PxD)
- Eliot Jones-Garcia, IFPRI
- Professor Yaojun Wang, China Agricultural University (CAU)
- Fatema Almulla, International Affairs Office, UAE Presidential Court