The World Economic Forum, in collaboration with stakeholders from both industry and academia, has launched a new insights report ‘Shaping the Deep-Tech Revolution in Agriculture’.
The report identifies seven deep-tech domains with the potential to drive agricultural transformation: generative artificial intelligence, computer vision, robotics, edge Internet of Things (IoT), satellite-enabled remote sensing, CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), and nanotechnology.
The seven technology domains identified in the report have the potential to trigger fundamental shifts in how crops are grown, monitored, protected, and distributed consequently improving productivity, sustainability, and resilience across the sector.
The report highlights potential of converging these technologies for high impact use cases such as autonomous swarm robotics, precision farm management, agentic AI systems, and carbon reporting.
It showcases use-cases such as climate resilient rice varieties that emit 20 per cent less emissions, precision agriculture in sugarcane that has improved yields by 40 per cent, and the use of remote sensing to predict supply chain risks and promote carbon finance to farmers.
The report calls for greater efforts to scale deep-tech innovations that can help reimagine agricultural systems and address the pressures.
It highlights importance of industry, research and investor collaboration and cross learning to bring in multi-disciplinary expertise, manage early-stage risks and unlock research capital. The report also urges governments to adopt agile policies and regulatory sandboxes to keep pace with technological advancement.
Quoting Jeremy Jurgens, Managing Director, Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Centre for Cybersecurity, World Economic Forum, a media statement said: “Harnessing the power of deep-tech to transform agriculture will require strong collaboration amongst diverse actors. This report is a first step toward understanding what’s possible, but the real impact will come from building the right ecosystems that connect science, industry, finance, and policy..”
Abhay Pareek, Project Lead, Fourth Industrial Revolution for Agriculture, World Economic Forum, said: “These use-cases range from AI-powered crop intelligence in India to autonomous robotics in Europe and satellite-based soil monitoring in Africa. These examples demonstrate that deep-tech can not only strengthen agricultural productivity and resilience but also build a more sustainable and inclusive global food systems.”
The report is released by the World Economic Forum’s Artificial Intelligence for Agriculture Initiative (AI4AI).
Established in 2021, AI4AI has been working across multiple regions to help stakeholders harness emerging technologies to make agriculture more inclusive, sustainable, and efficient.
AI4AI will further the deep-tech landscape in India through a dedicated platform to facilitate the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and best practices among stakeholders driving tech-enabled agricultural transformation, the statement added.
Published on November 7, 2025