How Microsoft's Entry into Ag Changes Everything
Digital transformation is the key to the future of food and agriculture. New partnerships like one between Bayer and Microsoft can help enable advancement of digital transformation in agriculture. This strategic partnership will work to build a new cloud-based set of digital tools and data science solutions for use across the food and agriculture industry.
These new capabilities will be available to businesses – from startups to global enterprises – to accelerate innovation, boost efficiency and support sustainability across food value chains. Through this partnership Bayer will work with Microsoft to co-develop new solutions that address critical industry scenarios such as farming operations, sustainable sourcing, manufacturing, and supply chain improvement, as well as environment, social, and governance monitoring and measurement.
This partnership is poised to benefit food, agriculture and adjacent industries. When specifically asked about the benefits for grocer retailers, Ranveer Chandra, the CTO of Microsoft Azure stated, “Grocers would benefit a lot from a data-driven agriculture and food supply chain. That is when we think of the entire food supply chain, all the way from the farmer to the logistics companies, the warehouse companies, the distributors, the food manufacturers, the retailer- every entity in the food supply chain would benefit from data and data driven insights. These insights would improve their efficiencies. But if this data could be shared across the food supply chain, it would light up new insights that didn't exist before and new business models, and new scenarios, which would impact the downstream users, the grocery retailers, the consumers, and much more. For example, there are many new scenarios that could be laid out. One of them is around food transparency. You can track and trace when there is an outbreak, you can know where that food came from, and you can issue a recall much more efficiently.”
Click here to listen to the full interview.
