As Deere Plows New Ground In AI Innovation, Health Care Should Reap Lessons

Deere boasts that its AI-enabled X9 combine makes it easy for the farmer to “set the specific outcomes you expect” and the combine will automatically adjust “to deliver the performance you want.”

Deere & Co.

When an old-line farm equipment maker’s AI innovations draw praise from sources as diverse as Progressive Farmer and experts in artificial intelligence business models, health care leaders should pay attention.

Deere & Co. has a track record of wowing impartial observers. In 2023, its chief executive officer gave a keynote address at CES, the Consumer Technology Association tradeshow, that, as I wrote then, was extolled by the chief medical officer of a health tech firm as “one of the best technological presentations I have ever seen.” Similarly, The Tech Buzz called Deere’s exhibit of autonomous agricultural and construction machinery at the just-concluded CES 2026 “one of the strongest real-world technology showings on the floor.”

There are fertile lessons here for the health care field. “Farming in the information age” started blooming as an agricultural focus at the turn of the 21^st century; by one estimate, “precision ag” has advanced to “Farming 4.0.” In health care, in contrast, only a handful of hospitals bothered to replace paper records with electronic ones before federal subsidies kicked in around 2011, even though home and office computing had been thriving for years. (My 1997 book declaring that medicine was entering the information age proved woefully overoptimistic.)

An AI Innovation Focus

Over time, Deere has deliberately remade itself into an agricultural tech company, as chronicled by a Forbes contributor back in 2017. Today, Deere executive Justin Rose told the OpenAI blog, Deere has successfully scaled the use of AI by carefully integrating technology and constantly evaluating the customer experience. For example, the company provides personalized setup guidance, preseason recommendations based on the farmer’s past planting and spraying patterns and real-time recommendations prompted by weather predictions and other information. The technology involved in all of this includes computer vision, satellite data, machine learning, neural networks, remote diagnostics and real-time data sharing.

“It’s all about weaving AI into every stage,” said Rose. “We’re building an AI-native customer success model that could be applied to any industry.”

Reorganizing Work

That assessment of the wide applicability of Deere’s efforts was echoed by Sangeet Paul Choudary, a senior fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and an internationally recognized thought leader on AI’s impact on business. In Reshuffle, his recent book advising companies about flourishing in the knowledge economy, Choudary commends Deere for understanding that AI-aided transformation offers the opportunity for “a shift not just in tasks, but in the way organizational systems are structured.”

Choudary notes that while Deere tractors use AI and robotics to distinguish individual plants and precisely apply inputs like fertilizer in order to improve yield, Deere goes beyond other precision agriculture providers with AI-enabled equipment that alters where and how farming decisions are made.

“By moving decision-making away from the farmer and into the machine, Deere alters the logic of value creation and, consequently, the organizational system of the farm,” Choudary writes. “In doing so, it shifts power from the farmer to the tool.” And, not incidentally, secures a competitive advantage for the company.

Deere’s Aaron Wetzel, vice president of production and precision ag systems, used different language in an interview with Progressive Farmer, but his description of Deere’s “essentially autonomous” X9 combine nonetheless made the point.

Automated Farming

“You just need to sit in the seat,” said Wetzel. The combine’s ”tech stack” anticipates what crops are coming up in the harvest and automatically adjusts its speed; turns itself at the end of rows; and monitors crop conditions like moisture levels, then adjusts in real-time. For example, the company touts its Harvest Settings Automation for allowing farmers “to set the specific outcomes you expect,” such as “acceptable limits for grain loss, foreign material and broken grain.” The combine then automatically calibrates variables like rotor speed, fan speed and sieve clearances to produce those outcomes.

It can also “share real-time grain weight with your entire harvest time,” followed by an automated unloading process that uses cameras and AI to adjust a grain cart’s position and fill level.

The result, says Wetzel, is 20% to 30% productivity gains that amount to “dollars in the pocket of our customers” – dollars Deere intends to share by a pricing arrangement that uses AI at the end of harvest season to calculate the return on investment of the machine.

Since a farmer’s goal is to produce and sell the greatest possible volume of healthy crops, what Deere is doing in health care terms is linking its compensation to improving both quality and economic outcomes. If only health care’s value-based reimbursement rules were as clear and calculated as quickly.

Back in 1961, an article in New Scientist on the future of farm automation noted that while “the idea of a farm run largely by automatic machinery may appear at first sight strange and unacceptable even to the scientifically minded reader,” this was “not only possible” but “Important for the future development of agriculture.” Sixty-five years later, Deere, whose eponymous founder was the first to develop a motorized plough to replace horses, is “very much on the path” to what Wetzel terms a full-season, “autonomous solution.”

Harvesting Lessons for Health Care

The life-and-death stakes in health care, of course, demand greater caution in granting autonomy to AI tech while reducing the human role, whatever the economic temptation. Moreover, while patients may sometimes feel as if they are objects whose illnesses are being profitably harvested by a mechanistic health care system, corn stalks don’t fill out consumer satisfaction surveys about their experience with the combine and soybeans don’t demand shared decision-making from the farmer.

Still, one is tempted to speculate on what Moline, Illinois-based Deere might be doing in health care AI today had it not sold its John Deere Health Plan at the end of 2005.

Despite the differences between customizing care for plants and people, Deere’s AI innovations hold lessons for the tech companies stampeding into health care and the providers and payers they covet as customers. Deere has displayed the vision and persistence not only to reorganize a deeply traditional industry, but to do so in a manner in which all stakeholders benefit.