How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Feed the World

Since the agricultural revolution millennia ago, farmers have worked with their hands. Now, the next agricultural revolution might work with artificial intelligence. That's the vision of Sara Menker, a former Wall Street trader who left her lucrative job at 29 years old to start Gro Intelligence, a software platform for agricultural data and analytics. The company harvests large amounts of data from a variety of sources--weather stations, government agencies, trade organizations, to name a few--and processes it into a "language that normalizes all of it" for companies to build predictive models around agriculture. "One of the things we realized is that agriculture is not just four or five crops," Menker said Tuesday at the Fortune Most Powerful Women International Summit in Toronto.