It's a legacy agriculture company - and your newest AI vendor

Companies now find it critical to augment general models with more industry-specific data if they're going to be useful

- Isabelle Bousquette

Bayer is known for selling seeds. Now it sells seeds and artificial intelligence.

Microsoft today announced it is working with the German pharmaceutical and agricultural group and other companies on specialized AI models fine-tuned on industry-specific data. The companies can now list and monetize those models on Microsoft's online model catalog.

For Bayer that means an AI model fine-tuned with its data and designed to provide answers on agronomy and crop protection is available to be licensed by its distributors, new AgTech startups, and even potentially competitors. The model can answer questions about ingredients in an insecticide or whether a product could be applied to cotton, for example.

"A lot of folks have the same pain points that we have," said Sachi Desai, Bayer's VP of AI Go to Market and Partnerships. "There's a lot of ways to not only amortize our own cost by allowing others to collaborate off the same platforms or build on it, but also to uplevel the outcomes for our customers."

Bayer this week cut its full-year earnings target after a tough agricultural market hit its crop-science division, and said it heads into next year with a muted outlook and likely declining earnings.