Can John Deere become one of the leading AI and robotics companies in the world alongside Tesla and Silicon Valley technology giants over the next decade? That notion may seem incongruous with the general perception of the 185-year-old company as a heavy-metal manufacturer of tractors, bulldozers and lawnmowers painted in the signature green and yellow colors. But that is what the company sees in its future, according to Jorge Heraud, vice president of automation and autonomy for Moline, Illinois-based Deere, a glimpse of which was showcased at last January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where Deere unveiled its fully autonomous 8R farm tractor, driven by artificial intelligence rather than a farmer behind the wheel. The autonomous 8R is the culmination of Deere's nearly two decades of strategic planning and investment in automation, data analytics, GPS guidance, internet-of-things connectivity and software engineering. While a good deal of that R&D has been homegrown, the company also has been on a spree of acquisitions and partnerships with agtech startups, harvesting know-how as well as talent.

The autonomous tractor is a version of Deere's existing 8R series machine, the largest of which has 410 horsepower. Current 8R users can upgrade their tractors with the autonomous driving system. The Deere tractor, unveiled at the CES 2022 tech conference in Las Vegas, isn't the world's first autonomous tractor. Smaller autonomous tractors are being used in specialty-crop farms. The application of the technology to larger vehicles is just getting started and promises to be highly consequential, according to Aron Cory, research manager for world-wide agriculture at International Data Corp. "The move from conventional tractors to autonomous tractors is going to be comparable from the move from horses to the combustion engine," he said.

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Farming and advanced AI may seem antithetical, but they're not. The venerable farm equipment company has not only long embraced advanced technologies, the company for years has evangelized adoption of high performance clusters and simulation software for product design. And Deere freely states it's an extremely complex undertaking. In a recent article in IEEE, Deere's Julian Sanchez, who heads the Moline, IL, company's intelligent vehicles strategy, said that while the company is working on autonomous driving, "it's not just about driving tractors around." The more difficult problem, he said, is crop classification.