Digital Agriculture and AI Innovation Roadmap for the Global Agrifood Systems Transformation
Three-year action plan
Description
The publication “Digital Agriculture and AI Innovation Roadmap for the Global Agrifood Systems Transformation” translates the high-level ambition of more efficient, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable agrifood systems into a three-year action plan. The roadmap establishes a multistakeholder ecosystem that pools knowledge of infrastructure and funding across shared missions and priority use cases. As part of this ecosystem, it introduces an AI governance toolkit that provides criteria and principles to guide the design selection of monitoring and scaling of digital agriculture and AI initiatives.
Technology
The report identifies 32 high-potential technologies and innovations, highlighting the “best-last chance” technologies to transform AI initiatives into scalable solutions, wherein AI is positioned as a force to guide the transformation to a desired future. Some of the examples that emerged during the first dialogue with multiple stakeholders include AI-powered decisions for soil data, MicroBioMe, which uses digital soil mapping to improve GIS-based soil microbiome predictions, and TinyML capable of detecting real-time water stress in coffee-banana intercropping systems, among others.
Target
The roadmap supports governments, innovators, researchers and funders to align strategies, crowd-in investment, identify knowledge gaps and scale well-governed digital agriculture and AI solutions.
Business model
The publication is freely available through the FAO Knowledge Repository and positioned as an open global public good. The resource has already received 190 downloads as of January 2026, despite its fresh publication release.
Impact
The roadmap’s main goal is to turn promising digital agriculture ideas into local, needs-driven, safe, interoperable, and scalable solutions. Specifically, its aim is to shift AI initiatives from scattered pilots and centralised monoliths towards a coordinated and goal-oriented framework. Some of the key achievements mentioned in the report is the first iteration of the roadmap concept based on the April 2025 Digital Agriculture and AI Innovation Dialogue. This resulted into the identification of core ingredients of the framework to become relevant to the community, which includes shared services, governance toolkit, and a demand-to-product pipeline.
Partners
Human Technology Foundation
Four Betters
Better production
Better environment
Better life
