Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos famously advised that a winning business strategy should be built on things that remain stable over time. Yet, in the volatile world of agriculture, stability is a luxury. Few industries are forced to endure such brutal market swings and rapid shifts, with the farmer ultimately absorbing the financial blow.
Ravishankar Cherukuri, CEO of UPL Sustainable Agri Solutions, believes AI can change that. He made his case at Cypher 2026, AIM’s flagship AI conference – He made a compelling case for how artificial intelligence can finally shield agriculture from its historic instability.
Farmers Absorb Every Shock
The market sets the price, Cherukuri said. But when the Iran war pushed raw material costs up by nearly twofold, the price farmers received did not move the same way.
Farmers can see prices jump to twice their level or fall to 20 per cent of last year’s. Costs for raw materials, urea, labour and machinery also swing sharply. This makes even basic farming harder. Add unpredictable weather and sudden pests and diseases, and the mix can wreck a business, he said.
Where AI Comes In
AI can forecast prices, optimise crop choice and link producers to regions with profitable global demand. It can also speed up research and development of resilient crops.
Agriculture’s link with AI is not new. A decade ago, his teams already used it in R&D, Cherukuri said. They applied genomics and bioinformatics to design products and genetically modified crops.
The 2010 Platform That Could Not Scale
In 2010, Cherukuri helped launch Dr. DEKALB Farm Care. The service gave farmers growing DEKALB corn custom, tech-enabled guidance on their mobile phones. It was a big success, he said. Farmers embraced it. The advice was relevant, and adherence to it was extremely high. Farmers were even willing to pay for it. But it could not grow. Personalising advice for each farmer cost too much to reach roughly 100 million farmers across India.
Why the Math Now Works
Farmers often lose out because of misallocation. What would improve their profits and cut their risks is a full-system reset. What the industry usually hands them is a pesticide in a bottle.
Cherukuri argued that AI changes the economics that stalled his 2010 platform. Advice built around what each farmer actually does is now within reach. Without AI, it would be far too costly, he said. With AI, it can be done.
AI Inside the Company’s Own Operations
The same shift is under way inside UPL. Field visits to one village, or a handful of them, may not show the full picture of a problem with many causes. Those visits are now digitised. The records show which village was visited, which farmers attended and what was discussed. Combined with product-flow data, they feed AI algorithms that his team is building. The aim is to decide what should happen in which village, and when.
The company is also using conversational intelligence to cut friction between farmers, dealers and itself. Cherukuri said UPL is only at the 10th percentile of this journey. He added that it is investing to take it further.