AgTech Week 2026 — even bigger and better

Every year, the AgTech Summit in Champaign gets bigger and better. This year, attendees came from 26 states, 14 countries, and 400+ different companies for the March 10 event, and Pixo was once again proud to be a sponsor. 

Over the past week, we attended the Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA) annual conference on Monday, the AgTech Summit on Tuesday, and a few dinners. There were many other events that we couldn’t squeeze in. 

While it would be impossible to try to capture everything that resonated with us (and to be sure, we were yacking in the lobby with old friends sometimes), here are some of the highlights that we captured:

Most inspiring: Linda Jing, CEO CEO and Board Director of Genective

Linda, who leads a team at the U of I’s Research Park developing disease- and pest-resistant seeds. Linda’s zeal for learning and team culture showed through, and she credited her team’s growth mindset and dedication, which helps them compete with much larger companies.

Most down-to-earth: Farmer perspectives panel at the CDA event, where farmers talked about AI adoption and their hopes for AI. Some choice words:

• “Farming is where ideas meet action,” and we’re always assessing how to do more with less. How can AI help reduce the busy work?
• “Time is our most valuable asset,” and AI shows great promise in helping farmers take a more scientific approach to decision-making with more data analysis at their fingertips.
• “My hope is with AI that instead of farms needing to get bigger to compete, we can make the farms we have more productive.”

Most user-centric: Tami Craig Schilling, Co-Founder, DeepRoot Strategies at the AI and AgTech panel

“If you’re a tool builder out there building in ag tech, think about a person like me that doesn’t know how these things think or how the magic happens behind the unit. Provide a prompt guide. …  Provide it right there for users. Because assuming that we’re going to get all the users trained is a big assumption. And if you want adoption, I think the more you can help a user … in the moment, in real-life scenarios, the more valuable” it can be.

Hottest new market: SAF (Sustainable Aviation Fuel) panel at AgTech Summit

Illinois is uniquely positioned to be a leader in developing, growing, transporting, and using this new clean fuel.

Putting AI into perspective: Sachi Desai, Vice President of Go-To-Market and Partnerships at Bayer

“What outcome do we want to drive? Because we have an opportunity right now to rethink systems, rethink how you approach a problem. And so the outcome is not moving a piece of equipment to spray something. The outcome is, “I want to be able to optimize my land to have the best ROI for the year.” And then you start to work backwards from that. … AI is not changing what you have to solve for.”

Most actionable advice: Vikram Adve, Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

“If you build the application layers above the LLMs, (your applications) will evolve with AI’s capabilities.”

Most thought-provoking: Brian Lutz, Vice President of Ag Solutions, Corteva Agriscience

“The pace of innovation is no longer constrained by the number of people involved.” 

Useful tool for the era of AI: AI Agribench (https://aiagribench.org/)
A benchmarking tool to compare the accuracy of agronomic chatbots. “AI AgriBench consortium is to provide farmers, policymakers, and the public with trustworthy mechanisms for evaluating and confidently using the new generation of AI-driven agronomy tools.”

U of I Extension in your pocket: Cropwizard (https://uiuc.chat/cropwizard)

“Welcome to the CropWizard Project in the AIFARMS AI Institute for Agriculture!  Ask any crop-related questions below, drawing on the power of Extension knowledge bases from around the US.”

AgTech week, after 11 years running, has really hit its stride. The speakers consistently showcase an impressive depth of understanding and experience. We’ve got a lot to digest, but we’re already looking forward to next year!