Cultivating Tomorrow: How AI Expands Our Sphere of Control for a Resilient Future

By Elizabeth Fastiggi|August 11, 2025

Editor’s note: “Cultivating Tomorrow” is a special series that shares insights from C-suite executives at leading AgTech companies, presented by AgTech PR. Its aim is to highlight the experiences of AgTech leaders driving agricultural transformation today. In this installment, Elizabeth Fastiggi, Chief Product Officer at Idealyst Innovation, provides insights into how AI is transforming uncertainty into opportunity — empowering ag leaders to build resilience, optimize risk, and shape tomorrow’s food system.

Over the past year, I’ve had the privilege of speaking with agribusiness leaders from across the industry, exchanging perspectives on the future of agriculture. One pattern has become clear: while curiosity about AI-driven innovation is ever-present, hesitation hinders action. Many cite the cyclical nature of agriculture and advocate for sticking to the established playbook to ride out another downturn. But what if, even in a tough cycle, we shifted our gaze from mere survival to future resilience?

Here’s my industry hot take: Artificial intelligence (AI) expands what is within our sphere of control. It challenges our assumptions about what is unknowable and offers the tools to optimize risk as an advantage.

Uncertainty dominates our news cycles, our business meetings, and dinner conversations. In fact, the word “uncertainty” was cited in earning calls more often during the first half of this year than at any time in the last 10 years. Against this backdrop, the ag industry is experiencing a profound structural shift, driven by global trade conditions, shifting consumer preferences, and disruptive technologies. We have a choice: maintain the legacy approach or proactively leverage technology to transform our businesses. AI gives us unprecedented power to optimize risk, a factor always present, up or down market, bumper crop or dry year. By keeping our eyes wide open and innovating smartly, we can build businesses that serve farmers and are stronger and more adaptable than ever before.

Risk Optimization Is a Leadership Imperative

One truth of agriculture is that risk — weather, market, regulation — never goes away. But the tools to anticipate and optimize those risks keep evolving. When new capabilities like AI emerge, it is tempting to relegate them to the “IT department” or consider them relevant only for a tech-focused startup. I’d argue the opposite: every business leader must ask, “How can AI help me understand the risks on the horizon and then optimize them to serve my customer, build better products, and develop resiliency within my teams?”

AI has become a buzzword and taken on a life of its own as a concept. In practice, it’s everything from more efficient R&D pipelines to smarter inventory forecasting to tailored outreach that helps customers during unpredictable seasons. It’s the chance to augment and amplify human expertise — leveraging data to create more reliable outcomes for our customers, partners, and stakeholders.

The foundation models that power generative AI really shine in managing complexity and are well suited to the ever-changing variables in agriculture. AI can help us evaluate multiple scenarios at once whether it is how a new crop may perform agronomically or how new markets will form based on consumer demand and geopolitical dynamics.

AI’s impact in agriculture depends on more than just models — it requires the right data. Devices and sensors are capturing high quality data in certain settings, but there is a wealth of data across the agri-food system still in analog form. Automating the capture of this information will accelerate the industry’s ability to harness the full potential of AI.

While AI is at an inflection point across many sectors, agriculture is uniquely positioned to battle-test and refine these tools because the use cases are fundamental to our very existence — ensuring they deliver real value including but not limited to creating a more resilient and nutritious global food supply.

AI: The New Leadership Imperative in Ag

AI must not be confined or delegated to the IT or innovation team. Every ag business leader — from retail, to supply chain, to field operations — has a stake in how these tools are deployed to optimize and anticipate enterprise risk and competitive differentiation.

Here’s how to move from theory to action:

1. Begin With Familiar Challenges: Identify where uncertainty is holding your business back, be it supply chain blind spots, fluctuating yields, or evolving farmer needs. Pilot AI solutions that focus on precise, definable problems. Early wins build institutional confidence.
2. Risk Optimization is a Team Sport: Engage cross-functional teams to find creative, relevant applications for AI that fit your unique business context.
3. Keep Agility Center Focus: Embed rapid feedback loops and transparency inside and outside your organization to adapt quickly and continuously improve.

Innovation in agriculture has always demanded vision, courage, and grit — the willingness to operate and adapt in predictably unpredictable conditions. Now is the time to invest in what will help us not just weather the current storm, but build a stronger, more resilient food system.

AI can help us see farther, act faster, and manage what was once unmanageable. But its value depends on us taking the first step — and then the next.

Let’s not wait for certainty to define our future. Let’s cultivate it, with every decision we make.

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