Do You Know How to Get to the Self-Driving Future?

AM: It’s all right. I’ll get excited for innovations in government regulation. That’s the fun step.

JK: Yes. If you want me to nerd out, I’ll nerd out on NHTSA all day long, but-

AM: That’s good to know. I’ll keep that in mind. Aubrey, I want to ask you the same question, which is, when can an ag worker kind of just step out of the tractor, but I also have a question for Twitter for you that I want to get to, which is, what is the reaction from farmers who may feel like they’re adding more complex systems to their workflow, or is there a general openness to new tools in the toolbox? So, if you could answer both of those huge questions in a few minutes that would be great.

AD: Yeah, absolutely. So, in terms of, when? It’s here already. I mean, that’s the good news is like we’ve been out in market for a couple years now. You guys saw a press release from John Deere making a really big announcement company-wide about being in market. And growers are going to be using, growers are already using our technology, they’re going to be using it at a larger scale this year and just growing from that. That’s the great thing in agriculture, there’s no lack of opportunity to go tackle with automation. And so, we’re in market today, and we’re just going to be taking more and more down, we’re starting with tillage, then we’re going to tackle planting, harvesting, all the steps in the production system and continue adding value to it for growers.

In terms of the Twitter question, I think growers are some of the most innovative experimental customers I’ve ever dealt with in my career, and I haven’t always been in agriculture. They know their bottom line better than anybody, so whatever technology you provide them, you better know your business case and you better know the value that you’re providing to them. But in terms of trying new things, I mean, you go on farms and people create new tools and new technology themselves that we’ve never seen sold by an OEM or a tech company before, homegrown systems, and you see a lot of innovation in the ag space. Growers take a ton of pride in knowing their own land and having a leg up maybe on their competition and how to do a certain operation better. I think that culture is already there in agriculture, and so, when you come to the table with something that’s transformational for them, they’re really excited about it.

Though in the past, I think this isn’t exclusive to agriculture, they’ve seen a lot of tech that sounds great, you know, it’s going to answer their problems, but at the end of the day, it really doesn’t. We used to get feedback about the data side of our business, how we can provide these insights coming off of our sensors and predictive analytics that’s super cool to talk about, really promising, but for a grower who’s worried about literally the changing weather of tomorrow and how that’s going to affect their yields for the rest of the year, there’s more skepticism in, is this technology really going to help me for this growing season, or is this a nice to have? And they’re busy people, so they don’t want to waste their time. And so, I think that is something, and I love working with types of people like that because it’s brass tax. If you go out and you show them how technology, and we do, we show up with our machines, we automate their tasks, and then they’re sold. They’re ready, they say, “Well, how can we get 10 more of these things on my farm?” They’re ready to adopt it, they’re very, very quick adopters, but they need to see the value. It needs to make sense financially for them as well. I don’t know if that-

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