Land O’Lakes is 103 years old and for most of the dairy cooperative’s existence, it did not have a chief technology officer.
That changed in 2018 when Teddy Bekele ascended to the role, an acknowledgement that even farming needs to be more tech forward.
Companies in established markets have traditionally viewed technology as “an enabler” to accelerate growth or productivity, says Bekele, who is leading the digital transformation efforts for the cooperative’s four business units. At Land O’Lakes, Bekele says, the core business mission remains the primary focus, “but I do think more and more, technology can go from being an enabler to being a driver and being at the center of what we do.”
With nearly $17 billion in annual revenue, Land O’Lakes has a broad business that includes dairy products sold under the namesake brand, Purina Mills animal feeds, and WinField United’s seeds and crops. By leaning in on tech, Bekele says, the Arden Hills, Minn.-based company is helping farmers optimize their milk production, lean on smarter data to determine which crops will grow best in the field, and establish more sustainable practices.
Combining machine learning technology with Land O’Lakes’ sprawling collection of agriculture research hubs has been especially eye-opening. The company, which sits at #245 on the Fortune 500, has more than 100 research plots of land all across the U.S. where it conducts testing and observes the best conditions for the various plant varietals it sells, as well as a 55,000-square-foot research hub that explores crop growth under extreme weather conditions.
Bekele shares the example of a farm in southern Minnesota, where one might think that conditions would be similar to a Land O’Lakes-owned research plot just 10 miles away. Indeed, that was once the assumption that guided the company’s practices.
But when crunching the data—including soil, the climate, and topography—machine learning is delivering some valuable, counterintuitive insights. It turns out that a plot that’s 300 miles away in South Dakota might actually be more representative of the Minnesota farm than the one 10 miles down the road. Those insights are shared with retail agronomists, who know all about field crops and who can help farmers understand what would perform best on their land.
Land O’Lakes is also starting to roll out a generative AI tool, developed in partnership with Microsoft, that acts as a virtual agent and can answer questions about crop insights and soil.
For decades, agronomists used a dense, physical book to pull the relevant farming information. An effort to digitize the asset into a PDF didn’t make searching any easier. But with the generative AI tool, farmers can do things like share a picture of an unusual weed growing in their field and share it with an agronomist, who can more speedily identify the weed with the new tool and make a recommendation on how to combat it.
Bekele, who initially joined Land O’Lakes in 2013 as senior IT director and as the chief information officer of the WinField United division, has led a bigger bet on cloud, also in partnership with Microsoft. About 55% of applications runs on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform today, up from 30% when he became CTO. Basic applications that don’t require immediate innovation remain on prem, but “whenever time’s up, and we can do something else with it, we’ll probably rip it out,” Bekele says.
John Kell
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NEWS PACKETS
Anthropic claims new Claude AI surpasses OpenAI. San Francisco-based AI startup Anthropic has announced a new version of its Claude model that it claims surpasses the capabilities of OpenAI’s most recent AI system, GPT-40. The announcement came just a few weeks after Fortune reported another tech firm, Unbabel, made similar claims about its new AI model as the industry’s “best” language translator. Both claims highlight the intensity and speed at which top AI firms are competing to match or surpass the features of one another’s software, but also the difficulty the rivals face in creating performance differentiation that only last more than a few weeks.
PayPal taps Walmart tech executive to lead AI push. PayPal has hired Srini Venkatesan, one of Walmart’s top tech executives, as its new chief technology officer to steer the payments tech firm’s push into AI. Venkatesan, who led a team of 14,000 at the retailer, will oversee AI, machine learning, and information security at PayPal. He is a key hire for PayPal CEO Alex Chriss, who joined the company in September and has tried to drum up investor enthusiasm for PayPal’s new AI-based products. PayPal’s current CTO, Archie Deskus, will leave the company after supporting the executive transition.
Cyberattack upends North American car dealerships. CDK Global, a company that provides software for thousands of auto dealers, was hit by cyberattacks that have impacted operations so severely that dealerships have resorted to writing vehicle orders by hand. CDK has launched an investigation into the “cyber incident” with third-party experts and warned that the restoration process will take several days to complete. Several major auto giants, including Ford and Stellantis, confirmed the CDK outage had impacted some of their dealers but that sales continued.
ADOPTION CURVE
CIOs take center stage. More than half of CIOs globally report directly to the CEO, an indication that businesses are increasingly recognizing the business value and advantages that can be created by prioritizing emerging technologies, like AI, machine learning, and data and analytics. A survey by Deloitte found nearly two-thirds of tech leaders in the U.S. report directly to the CEO and of those surveyed, most have a CIO or chief digital information officer (83%), with CTO being the next most common (52%).
One of the big drivers of CIOs’ rising profiles: COVID.
Lou DiLorenzo Jr., principal and national U.S. CIO program leader at Deloitte, says corporate tech leaders were able to distinguish themselves during the pandemic by virtualizing work for entire organizations almost overnight. The leadership skills they showed off, as well as the greater perceived importance of technology, led CEOs to rethink reporting relationships.
“This is fundamentally how business works now,” says DiLorenzo. “It's an important signal to the organization if the technology leader is not just around their leadership table, but also reports to them on the criticality of it.”
JOBS RADAR
Hiring:
- AppFolio, a real estate software company, is seeking a vice president and chief information officer based in Santa Barbara, California. Posted salary range: $175K-$350K/year.
- Redaptive, an energy-as-a-service provider that funds and installs energy-saving equipment, is seeking a chief technology officer based in Denver. Posted salary range: $300K-$350K/year.
- JetBlue is seeking a vice president of technology products, based in the airline’s New York headquarters. Posted salary range: $295K-$390K/year.
Hired:
- Bank of New York Mellon announced the appointment of Leigh-Ann Russell as CIO and global head of engineering, joining the financial services firm on September 15 and reporting to President and CEO Robin Vince. Russell joins BNY from oil and gas giant BP, where she most recently served as EVP of innovation and engineering.
- PowerCo SE named HW Vassen as the Volkswagen-backed battery company’s new CTO, effective on August 1. In his prior role as head of series development, Vassen had already played a key role in the development of PowerCo’s new cell technology that’s expected to go into mass production next year. As CTO, Vassen will oversee technology, product development, and testing and analytics.
- Ascential Medical & Life Sciences has appointed Vinod Mirchandani as CTO, joining the medical equipment company from Thermo Fisher Scientific, where he helped transform the company’s R&D organization. As CTO, Mirchandani will identify emerging trends where tech can be leveraged and strengthen Ascential’s capabilities to support customers with improved workflows and reduced costs.
- Aetion appointed Ken Watson as CTO to steer the healthcare analytics company’s overall engineering and product strategy. Watson initially joined Aetion in August 2023 as SVP of engineering and previously held tech roles at Microsoft, the Toronto Stock Exchange, and WeWork.
- NMPD, a nonprofit that connects patients to donors to receive life-saving therapies, named Jim Graham as CIO. Graham will join the organization, which was previously known as Be The Match, on July 8 and will lead IT. Most recently, he spent 11 years at pharmacy benefits management company Prime Therapeutics.
