(Yicai) Jan. 21 -- China’s use of artificial intelligence in agriculture is an important case to watch and could provide valuable lessons for other emerging markets, a senior executive at Syngenta Group, the world’s largest agricultural technology company, told Yicai at the World Economic Forum that kicked off in Davos, Switzerland yesterday.

In China, AI in agriculture is not about creating the most complex models, said Feroz Sheikh, chief information and digital officer at Basel-based Syngenta. Rather, it is integrated into practical tasks such as identifying crop pests and diseases, deciding the best time to apply pesticides and issuing weather alerts, all of which is presented in the local language.

“If a technology can’t directly help farmers make better daily decisions, it will be difficult for it to be used on a large scale,” Sheikh said.

In recent years, AI has been embraced by many industries, including finance, manufacturing, energy and healthcare, as a core driver of productivity. But in farming, adoption has been slower. 

According to Sheikh, the slower pace of adoption reflects the need for caution in a highly risk-sensitive sector, rather than any fundamental limitations of the technology itself. Agriculture is highly complex and extremely risk-sensitive. Any mistakes in the application of technology can directly affect farmers’ livelihoods.

Unlike in finance or the internet sector, agriculture is not short of proof-of-concept projects, Sheikh said. The real challenge is replicable and sustainable large-scale applications. In many emerging economies where smallholder farmers dominate, teaching them to use AI is often more important than the capabilities of the AI models themselves.

In this context, China’s example matters not only because of the size of its market, but also because it shows a practical pathway for agricultural AI, including the spreading of digital tools, improving infrastructure and coordinating across the industrial chain, making it easier for AI to move from experimentation to daily decision-making, Sheikh said.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Kim Taylor