This weekly update brings important news about how agentic artificial intelligence is changing farms and food companies all around the world. Agentic AI is not like regular computer programs that just follow instructions. Instead, these systems think like smart helpers—they make their own decisions, learn from what they see, and take actions without someone telling them every single step.

PepsiCo's Smart Farms in Asia-Pacific

One of the biggest stories is what PepsiCo is doing with potatoes for its famous Lay's brand snacks. Farmers who grow potatoes for Lay's in countries across Asia face a big problem: climate change is messing up the monsoon rains they have depended on for thousands of years. One farmer explained it perfectly: "The only way to farm now is to inspect every single crop every single day." But how can a farmer check thousands of plants spread across many different fields every single day? The answer is agentic AI.

PepsiCo worked with a company called Cropin to build something called Lay's Smart Farm, which is an AI platform that watches potato fields all the time. This system uses satellite cameras in space and sensors on the ground to check the health of plants. It looks at photos from the sky, compares them to weather patterns, and learns from years of past information about that farmland. The AI then tells farmers exactly which fields need water, which plants have diseases, and when to harvest. This technology means farmers can work smarter even when the weather is unpredictable.

Walmart's Fresh Produce Protection

Walmart has the same kinds of problems with its fresh fruits and vegetables. The company works with farmers all over the world, and bad weather, diseases, and price changes can destroy their supply chains. Walmart also partnered with Cropin to build AI tools that help the company predict which crops will grow well, see dangers before they happen, and make smarter plans about where to buy food. This is exactly what agentic AI does—it watches many pieces of information at once and helps humans make better decisions.

Argentina's Agentic AI Revolution

In Argentina, the leading energy company YPF just announced a huge transformation using agentic AI. They launched something called Digital Suppl.AI, which is a platform made up of 46 different AI agents. Think of these agents like 46 invisible workers, each one an expert at different jobs. Some agents watch purchasing, some track inventory levels, some manage contracts with sellers. These AI agents work together, and they are 100 times faster than people doing the same work by hand.

YPF built this system using something called "AI Pods," which means small teams of AI agents supervised by human experts. The human experts make sure the AI agents are doing the right thing. This combination of AI power and human judgment is helping YPF reduce wasted money, move products more efficiently, and work better across the whole company.

Modernizing the Flower Trade

In the Netherlands, a company called Plantion that runs an enormous flower and plant auction every day is rebuilding its computer system using AI. Every single day, Plantion sells more than half a million flowers and plants. The old computer system was built a long time ago and was very complicated. Nobody even had proper written instructions for how it worked. Using agentic AI, Plantion and a company called Beyonder are reverse-engineering the old system and rebuilding it with modern AI technology. This means AI is helping them understand how the old system works, then building a new, better version.

Why This Matters for Everyone

The food and agriculture industry is now at a turning point. Companies that use agentic AI early are already seeing amazing results. Some companies are cutting their costs by more than 20 percent, and their workers are becoming more than 70 percent more productive. That means companies can provide food more cheaply and quickly while also helping the environment.

Agricultural companies face what experts call "Four Critical Tensions": they need to keep costs down, make food better, help the environment, and improve people's health. Regular computers can only solve one or two of these problems at a time. But agentic AI can work on all four at once. It can suggest which crops use less water, which farming methods are better for soil, and which foods are healthier for people.

The Future is Now

The most important lesson from this week's news is that agentic AI in agriculture is not something for the future—it is happening right now. Companies that start using these systems early will get huge advantages, while companies that wait might fall behind and never catch up. The smartest "farmhands" that nobody sees are AI agents working 24 hours a day, making decisions, learning from mistakes, and helping feed the world.