LATEST THINKING

Accenture technology vision 2014 for agribusiness—grow your digital enterprise

Six technology trends are affecting the future of agribusiness. Use them to power your business outcomes.

Overview

Technology offers tremendous potential to help agribusinesses keep up with the growing demand for agricultural products—the need to feed, fuel and fortify 9.6 billion people around the world by 2050. The latest technology can have major impact across the agribusiness value chain. Maximize its use to more profitably compete, improve margins, better manage producer relationships and serve your customers.

Explore the new wave of technology trends that agribusiness leaders need to act on in the next three to five years to become more agile and efficient digital enterprises.

Background
Every year, the Accenture Technology Labs and Accenture research organization pinpoint the emerging IT developments that will have the greatest impact on companies and other organizations in the years ahead. The 2014 research effort began with the collection of more than 3,000 ideas and comments on technology trends, disruptions and hypotheses from the architects, engineers and scientists across Accenture who see the impact of technology changes every day in their work with clients.

Accenture’s agribusiness knowledge leaders have synthesized these findings to reveal the impact of these trends and the opportunities they present for the future of agribusiness.

Key Findings

These six technology trends show how agribusinesses can plow through their biggest challenges using emerging technology:

  • Data supply chain: Allow the massive amount of data available—yield, herd health, pricing, weather, soil conditions, product performance, maintenance needs, workforce and more—to flow into systems so it can be consumed in an actionable way.

  • Digital/physical blur: As the physical world comes online, there is a new layer of connected intelligence that can allow machines, as well as employees, partners and suppliers, to evolve from reaction to prediction.

  • From workforce to crowdsource: Cost-effectively build a temporary workforce that supplies unique skills at the point of need to provide a competitive advantage and help you manage margins.

  • Business of applications: The more quickly your agribusiness can create and launch new applications in today’s turbulent markets, the better you can innovate, collaborate and build your competitive edge.

  • Harnessing hyperscale: Hyperscale can level the playing field by giving all agribusinesses the same level of access to computing capacity and storage.

  • Architecting resilience: Systems must be dynamic, accessible and continuous—not just designed to spec, but designed for resilience under failure and attack.

Recommendations

Becoming a digital agribusiness isn’t just about incorporating technology into the business; it’s about using technology to reinvent yourselves to thrive in this digital world.

It’s an exciting future of opportunities for agribusinesses that includes:

  • Creating and delivering context-specific information in near real time.

  • Accessing the expertise of the crowd to deliver unique and differentiating capabilities and scale your business.

  • Developing modular apps that make life easier for your producers, customers and employees to work harmoniously across the value chain.