The Australian agriculture sector has long been interested in how technology can help change the way farmers grow crops, manage resources and predict outcomes. This is part of promoting more sustainable and efficient agricultural practices worldwide.
As artificial intelligence tools become more widely available, farmers across the country are using AI for everything – from tracking crops due to illness to predicting a high possibility of optimizing irrigation strategies, and assessing pasture and livestock status.
But it's far from paddocks and fields, and the next wave of AI innovation feels its presence around kitchen tables and home offices in rural Australia and local areas. With the rise of agent AI, technology empowers AI agents to act autonomously without human supervision – farmers are leaning towards digital labor to manage their businesses.
This is the realm of Farm Focus, a 45-year-old business originally founded in New Zealand, providing farm financial management applications and tools to help farmers manage forecasts and plans.
The business recently transformed into Salesforce, helping to digitally transform the entire business. This includes the “Daisy” expansion. This is an AGE agent focusing on stable farms with 10,000 customers with farm management needs.
“We answer customer questions quickly and accurately and draw from our knowledge base,” said Blair Rooney, head of growth at Farm Focus. “If you run into a query, you don't get a response right away. There are no error messages. You'll use natural language to hand over to one of the customer's success teams.
“We also have agents focused on employees who help our internal teams drive away our CRM. They empowered them to generate reports and insights from our data, improving processes that were previously fairly manual,” added Rooney.
Less than 12 months later, Farm Focus was able to replace over 40 different tools with a single unified customer 360 platform. With the data cloud, businesses integrate data and have an instant impact on sales and service teams, from subscriptions to cases, pipelines, opportunities and campaigns.
Now, with AgentForce, 24-hour business support is quick and easy for farmers to access, allowing staff to use their data and knowledge base more effectively, while providing exceptional customer experiences. Along the way, the business estimates it has saved more than $1 million by integrating its tech platforms and simplifying its business without affecting customer service or engagement.
Leading agent AI innovation in the agricultural sector is a critical time. Rooney said up to 60% of farmers currently using Farm Focus in their home, New Zealand, are expected to retire from full-time farming over the next 15 years. It is a generational change already seen in Australia, with farmers over the age of 65 now making up 20% of all farmers in the country.
“We don't design the tools we do today. That's for the next generation,” says Rooney. “When that inheritance and retirement occurs, people who take over those farms expect more. They don't have to contact the call center and wait on hold when they can perform many tasks on the farm over and over. They want to get answers right away.
Providing farmers with innovative, AI-powered tools is not to replace the human connections that many agricultural businesses can succeed. “We want to adopt the technology just like farmers by using the right tools at the right time and not only at the right time,” says Rooney. “This doesn't just install the chatbot and leave it alone. We want to make AI innovation meaningful for farmers and teams to support it. We have to do it in a natural way.”
Farm Focus' next roadmap is to expand the use of AI agents to support marketing teams, build campaigns, develop segments and provide a personalized, bespoke experience for all customers.
“AgentForce is quickly adding value to our business. There is a scalable digital labor that can be customized to meet the needs of farmers by updating the actions, context and knowledge parameters used by agents, and we look forward to adding action and value to our agents over time.”
“This business was built by farmers for farmers and now uses agent AI, so you can see the value right away.”
Farm Focus will be one of many Salesforce customers to announce today at the AgentForce World Tour Melbourne. For more information, please click here.
