Wednesday, November 12, 2025

Why Land O’Lakes is piloting a new AI tool called ‘Oz’ in bid to help boost profits on cost-pressured American farms

American farmers are facing intense business pressures from all sides. Crop prices have been plunging, while tariffs have pushed up the cost of fertilizer, machinery, and other farming equipment. And then there’s the issue of labor. The U.S. agricultural workforce tumbled by 7% from March through July of this year.

“How can we help farmers be more profitable?” It was a critical question that Leah Anderson, president of Land O’Lakes’ crops insights division WinField United, and the dairy cooperative’s Chief Technology Officer Teddy Bekele, asked each other about a year ago, before economics on the farm became even more dire throughout 2025.

Knowing that farmers are always angling to achieve the most profit per acre possible, Land O’Lakes developed and is currently piloting a new AI tool called “Oz,” which can help agronomists as they work with farmers to map out an ideal crop production plan that accounts for different weather variations, soil health, pest risks, and seed selection. All those decisions ultimately factor into a successful yield for the farmer.

Oz relies on Land O’Lakes’ insights, including millions of data points compiled over a 20-year period by the Minnesota-based Fortune 500 company. Land O’Lakes worked with Microsoft to build the Oz mobile app, which is currently an internal pilot program and designed to replace a physical 800-page book that agronomists rely on to make recommendations to farmers.

Anderson says she is “very confident” that Land O’Lakes will be able to prove the return on investment for Oz to justify a full deployment. “At the end of the day, a farmer is extremely pressured from a profitability perspective and so they need to know that what they’re using is actually going to have an impact,” says Anderson. “They cannot waste a dime right now.”

Land O’Lakes is monitoring Oz’s ability to help improve farm yields with the right insights, the time saved in conversations between agronomists and farmers, and ease pressure on the workforce. Anderson says that one out of every four retail agronomists exit the organization each year and that with such high turnover, there’s a lot of pressure on the more senior staff to train newer employees. An AI tool like Oz could make onboarding easier.

“The reality is it’s hard to recruit into rural America,” explains Anderson. “It’s hard to get folks to stay and develop their careers.”

Oz is one component of a multiyear strategic partnership with Microsoft that Land O’Lakes announced on Wednesday, as the AI assistant is built on models within Azure AI Foundry. The companies say that Land O’Lakes has migrated more than two-thirds of its IT environment to Microsoft Azure and is piloting Microsoft Copilot licenses. Microsoft has also partnered with Land O’Lakes for generative AI training, including town halls and “data and AI days.” The pair vows to collaborate on additional AI-enabled solutions focused on the agriculture industry in the future.

“This infrastructure is the foundation for innovating with AI,” says Lorraine Bardeen, corporate vice president of AI transformation at Microsoft, adding that the teams “collaborated on Oz’s architecture, model selection, data structure and indexing and system prompts,” which optimized the accuracy of responses.

Some use cases that Land O’Lakes is deploying with Oz include helping an agronomist as they map out a farm plan before growing season, determining which biopesticides or biofertilizers are needed for pest control or to make nutrients more available in the soil for plants to use. Another way the tool can be used is during the growing season when adjustments may need to be made if weeds get out of control or an invasive insect species attacks.

In both cases, there could be thousands of different product recommendations or formulations that could be utilized to address those issues. To quickly pull the right info, agronomists can either type in a prompt or use voice commands to ask a question and get a response from Oz.

While Anderson declined to share a time horizon for how long the pilot phase would last, she said that Land O’Lakes is keeping an especially close eye on hallucinations. The co-op has a dedicated group of senior agronomists, from all across the U.S., who are able to pressure test the regionally relevant responses and ensure the outputs are valid.

“Oz has to give accurate recommendations every time,” says Anderson. “The second Oz starts hallucinating or spitting out a bad recommendation is when we’ll lose any excitement or willingness to adopt and it’ll erode trust.”

And while the name for Oz may evoke the rural Kansas farm that Dorothy called home in “The Wizard of Oz,” the development team was actually inspired by the abbreviation for ounce, which is oz.

“When you’re making decisions about how to mix products or how much water goes with them, you’re worrying a lot about ounces and not screwing that up,” says Anderson.

John Kell

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NEWS PACKETS

Alarms ring about AI’s impact on jobs. Plenty of data points have emerged over the past couple weeks on the impact of AI on employment, including a surge in job cuts in October that was led by the tech industry, according to a report by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. One tech giant whose latest cuts were not included in those figures was IBM, which last week said it would cut thousands of jobs as it prioritizes AI and software. Consulting firm Korn Ferry, meanwhile, warned that 43% of companies plan to replace roles with AI, with a focus on operations and back-office roles, as well as entry-level positions. Washington has taken notice with a bipartisan bill that’s been drafted and would require companies to report AI-related layoffs to the Department of Labor on a quarterly basis.

CBO targeted in cyber incident. The Congressional Budget Office, the government office that provides analysis that lawmakers rely on during the budget process, last week disclosed it had been hacked and had taken steps to add additional monitoring and new security controls to protect the agency. The Washington Post reported that the attack was done by a suspected foreign actor, citing people familiar with the matter, though the agency didn’t confirm that detail. Separately last week, the Post stated that it had been impacted by a series of breaches involving Oracle’s E-Business Suite platform. Bloomberg reported in October that the software giant had been probing the hacks of “numerous” customers’ E-Business Suite applications, following an extortion campaign that targeted those customers.

OpenAI muddles the message on if the government should guarantee chip financing. While speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference last week, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar generated headlines that didn’t focus too much on her comments about a future IPO (she says it is “not on the cards”), but rather for her comments that the AI startup hoped that the federal government could play a role in backstopping financing for data-center deals. A day later, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman walked back those comments, saying, “If we screw up and can’t fix it, we should fail.” Friar later expanded on her thoughts, saying she was describing how the broader framework of support to build more industrial capacity would require the “private sector and government playing their part.”

ADOPTION CURVE

Tech debt is a looming obstacle for AI implementation. With global IT budget spending expected to increase by 10% next year, fueled by a voracious appetite for AI, unaddressed tech debt—the poor quality code, dusty hardware that needs to be upgraded, and siloed data that needs to be reorganized for large language model training—is vexing CIOs.

81% of executives agree that tech debt is a barrier to leveraging AI at scale and 69% say it will render some initiatives financially untenable, according to a new survey of 1,300 senior AI decision makers published by IBM Institute for Business Value. They say that between 18% to 29% of total AI implementation costs through 2027 will be attributed to dealing with tech debt. In a $20 billion company that puts 20% of IT spend into AI, such debt could add $120 million a year in implementation costs, IBM reports.

Matt Lyteson, co-CIO of IBM, tells Fortune that organizations that fully account for the cost of addressing tech debt in the AI use cases they explore tend to see significantly better ROI (29% higher, in fact) than those that don’t, because the kick-off for those projects are far more realistic about the spend.

“Understanding how we need to take our legacy—and maybe in some cases, less modern tech environments—into account as we’re facing AI becomes extremely important in figuring out what the return on investment is going to be,” says Lyteson.

JOBS RADAR

Hiring:

- Rowan Digital Infrastructure is seeking a head of IT, based in Denver. Posted salary range: $200K-$235K/year.

- General Dynamics is seeking a chief information systems officer, based in Falls Church, Virginia. Posted salary range: $144.4K-$195.4K/year.

- Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals is seeking a chief information security officer, based in Bridgewater, New Jersey. Posted salary range: $280K-$360K/year.

- Anaplan is seeking a VP of IT, based in San Francisco. Posted salary range: $257K-$348K/year.

Hired:

- Sony Music Publishing appointed Michael Young as CIO, joining the music publisher after most recently serving as chief product and technology officer at financial risk management advisory Chatham Financial. Previously, Young also served as CTO for news agency Reuters.

- Equinix named Douglas Merrill as CISO, reporting to Harmeen Mehta, who serves as chief digital and innovation officer. Merrill was the data center operator’s interim CISO for the past six months and was previously a partner at consultancy McKinsey. He also served as CIO and VP of engineering at Google.

- Butter Payments, which helps subscription-based businesses recover revenue from failed payments, named Sonali Sambhus as CTO. Sambhus joins Butter after most recently leading the developer and machine learning platform at financial technology company Block. She has also held executive roles at real estate listings website Realtor.com and mobile video on demand service Vuclip.

- Avid Bioservices named Dave Stewart as chief technology and transformation officer, a newly created role for the biopharmaceutical company. Stewart will lead Avid’s integration of technology across the company’s development and manufacturing network, with a focus on automation and integration of new advanced tools. Previously, Stewart has held leadership roles at Eli Lilly and Biogen.

- Impact Climate Technologies appointed Bob Toupin as CIO, effective November 1. Toupin previously served as SVP of IT and DC technologies for supply chain consultancy Tompkins Solutions. He also previously served as CIO at healthcare workforce services company Jackson Healthcare and building products distributor BlueLinx.

- Devereux has appointed Devang Patel to the newly created position of SVP and CIO, joining the nonprofit provider of behavioral healthcare to steer the IT team and vendor partnerships. Prior to joining Devereux, Patel served as CIO and CTO at e-commerce logistics company Radial, which was acquired by Belgian Post Group, and was a senior director of software engineering at e-commerce giant eBay.

- Village Farms announced the appointment of Brian Ellis to the newly created leadership position of chief information and technology officer. Ellis joins the cannabis operator with over 25 years of IT experience across a variety of sectors, including apparel giant Nike, golf sports equipment maker Topgolf Callaway, and online travel company Booking.com.