For generations, farmers tracked their fields on paper ledgers and spreadsheets; now, John Deere is letting them talk directly to their operational data with JD, a new conversational AI tool it said is designed to turn years of private field metrics into instant, profit-boosting answers. JD operates exclusively on the historical data for each farm.
For generations,farmershave tracked their data, first on paper and then in spreadsheets. Analyzing that information was always a challenge, depending on the farmer’s analytical skills — or lack thereof — noted John Deere.
The Moline, Ill.-basedcompanysaidOperations Centeris the new heart of digital operations for its customers. Farmers and growers can use the mobile platform to track inputs and outputs and manage the variables that control modern farm equipment.
Seeking to reinforce customer trust alongside the rollout of JD, Deere stated that farm data belongs to producers and that farming data privacy and operational value are central to its platform.
“I want toputapunctuationmarkonafive-letterwordyou’regoingtohearalot[today]:TRUST,” said Jahmy Hindman, chief technology officer at John Deere. “You’regoingtohearalotaboutAI.You’regoingtohearalotabouttrust. That’s an important element of how we think about product development.”
“Wecertainlydoourowntesting,” he added. “Doesitcreatevalue?Butitalsohelpstohaveathirdparty,anindependentsource, [like Iowa State University]tobeabletodothatacrosstheirowntestingcapabilities,andthenacrosstheiroutreachtorealfarmerswhoareusingthistechnologyonrealfarmsandareprovidingrealfeedbackrelativetothevalue.”
JD enables farmers to have a conversation with the vast amount of field, machine, and operational data they generate, said Deere. The company claimed that they can use it to improve yields, drive savings, and strengthen farm profitability throughAI.
“The AI development team has been tracking the growth and evolution of generative AI over the past three years,” Melissa Neuendorf, principal product manager for customer AI solutions at John Deere, toldThe Robot Report.
During that time, the Deere AI team has tracked frontier large language models (LLMs) and how they can benefit its customers. According to Neuendorf, most customers “don’t even know what an LLM is, nor do they care; our job is to hide that complexity from them.”
Beyond machine learning for functions like perception and obstacle avoidance, the goal of AI development at Deere is to find ways to improve farm performance, however that’s measured, she said.
The first AI product announcement came in August 2025 with the release of Help AI, a feature in Operations Center that enables users to ask questions about equipment setup and debugging. This feature employed AI to assist users in quickly resolving setup and repair issues.
Now, with JD, farmers can ask open-ended questions of their farm data, and JD will analyze their corpus of historical farm data to extract answers.