Artificial intelligence is everywhere in agribusiness conversations right now. The CEO of one of the companies building AI for ag retail wants retailers to hear the caveats first.
“AI isn’t a magic wand. It isn’t a silver bullet fix,” says Alex Reichert, co-founder and CEO of AgVend. “It requires humans to think critically.”
Reichert’s first warning is about data. AI is only as good as the context it’s given, he says, and if the data is flawed, the output will be flawed too. That means retailers have a job to do before any AI tool can deliver. They have to supply complete context, certify that it’s accurate and agree with their technology partner on which data can be trusted.
Treat AI “like a flawed human,” Reichert says. It speaks eloquently and can fool users into thinking it knows more than they do, so salespeople and agronomists still have to check its work. Sometimes agentic or generative AI is the answer, he says. Sometimes it isn’t, and you need a person.
His second warning is about building it yourself. Many agribusiness companies thought they could “vibe code” their own farm management information system (FMIS) or CRM with AI tools, Reichert says, and they ran into the classic product adoption curve. The prototype was easy. The full system was hard, and keeping it running required a bigger staffing commitment than simply buying software.
For all the cautions, Reichert argues the bigger risk is sitting out. Here are five trends he says retailers should watch to gauge that risk.
1. Your biggest growers are going digital first
Agriculture is restructuring, and the growers who will drive retail business for the next 30 years look different. According to Reichert, they’re increasingly digital natives, farm at larger scale and run their operations with more sophistication.
AgVend’s data shows how concentrated that shift is. On average, a retailer’s AgVend customer portal reaches about 43% of its growers within 12 months, and those growers represent about 80% of the retailer’s business.
The risk: The customers who are most valuable to you are the first to expect digital service.
2. One-size-fits-all selling is fading
Selling to farmers means sitting at the intersection of customer expectations for personalized selling plus tools that enable sales people to meet that expectation. In other words, retailers can no longer treat every farmer the same.
Consider a grower who bought seed three years ago but not since. That grower can be flagged to the sales team and offered a loyalty boost on a seed purchase. A grower who normally books crop protection or fertility and is now more than two weeks late can be flagged as a churn risk.
Retailers could find those signals before, Reichert says, but AI makes them easier and less expensive to act on. In one case, AgVend’s Nexxus product showed a manufacturer that a farmer hadn’t ordered a fungicide he historically bought. The manufacturer alerted the retailer, which made the sale and saved a $120,000 order that would otherwise have been lost.
The risk: A competitor that spots your customer’s churn signal first can win that sale.
3. The bottleneck is time, not data
Retailers already have plenty of systems and data, Reichert says. Sales teams don’t want another report to read on their phone. “Systems have been overbuilt,” Reichert says, and they’ve lost sight of how to enable better workflows.
AgVend’s answer is Goose, an AI voice-to-order tool that launched a year ago. Salespeople speak, and Goose drafts orders and notes using ag-specific language. Each draft requires human approval, and according to the company, 93% are approved. Some salespeople have become power users because “screens were never the tool for agribusiness salespeople,” Reichert says.
“What if a retailer could scale the time of 10% of their salespeople to more acres and more products?” Reichert asks.
The risk: Your sales team stays buried in order entry while competitors’ teams are out in the field.
4. AI is changing hiring, not replacing people
He’s blunt about what it means for individual careers. “Claude won’t replace agronomists. Agronomists who leverage AI will replace those who don’t,” Reichert says.
Other industries report about 30% efficiency gains from AI. In agriculture, Reichert says, that could let retailers delete the unfilled positions they’ve posted. For an industry facing a chronic labor shortage, that’s significant.
The risk: Open positions stay unfilled, and your team falls behind AI-assisted competitors.
5. Winners will know their numbers
Reichert says the retailers that outcompete the market will know three things:
- their cost to serve
- their churn risk
- the opportunity within their geography and just outside it
They’ll need systems that show how to lower cost to serve, gain market share and surface leads.
AgVend is responding by overhauling its own business. The company started as a marketplace, moved to pulling out insights with its customer portal, and is now surfacing relevant insights with an easy way to act on them.
“This year we disrupt ourselves,” Reichert says. AgVend says its retail customers together account for about 39% of North American ag retail sales.
The risk: Without that visibility, you’re competing on guesswork.
