On a mission to help farmers produce more with less, agricultural innovator Bayer Crop Science is changing the way the world farms. But the very data that powers the company’s product and research excellence also posed a significant operational challenge. With huge amounts of agronomic, environmental, and biological data flowing across the organization, Bayer Crop Sciences knew it needed to modernize its digital operations. The company worked alongside AWS Partner Slalom and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create a solution that would transform how Bayer Crop Science’s teams work internally and how its solutions serve farmers globally. With support from Slalom, the company built a secure solution that boosts developer productivity and delivers near real-time insights to farmers.

Opportunity | Supporting Engineering Teams with a Collaborative Approach

As Bayer Crop Science began to focus more on precision agriculture, the company knew that internal data science practices needed to evolve. Data science teams were operating independently of each other, which led to inefficiencies, duplicated efforts, and difficulty scaling solutions from pilot to production.

Bayer Crop Science saw a strategic opportunity to modernize its approach using Generative AI. Rather than try to build everything in-house, Bayer Crop Science leaned into its long-standing relationships with Slalom and AWS. “We wanted to work with somebody that had a deep understanding of our technology stack and also the internal culture of our teams,” says Amanda McClerren, chief information officer and head of digital transformation at Bayer Crop Science. “We really wanted to embed those external talents seamlessly with our internal teams and have that become a true extension of our internal engineering capability.”

Solution | Designing a Generative AI Approach Rooted in Real-World Best Practices

With support from Slalom, Bayer Crop Science began building an integrated, scalable AI environment using Amazon SageMaker—which brings together widely adopted AWS machine learning and analytics capabilities—and Amazon SageMaker Canvas, which empowers developers to transform data at petabyte scale. This opened advanced analytical techniques to citizen data scientists, who have less technical training—a major milestone in democratizing access to cutting-edge tools and improving productivity across teams.

Slalom brought an “outside-in” perspective, showing how companies in other industries were applying similar technologies. This helped the company pressure-test its ideas and design a generative AI approach rooted in real-world best practices. “Slalom has a lot of technical experience and expertise and an understanding of how other companies from other industries are using the technology, and bringing that outside-in perspective was very important to us,” says McClerren.

Outcome | Near Real-Time Insights for Farmers and Productivity Gains for Bayer Crop Sciences

More recently, Bayer Crop Sciences began exploring the use of Amazon Q, the most capable generative AI–powered assistant for accelerating software development, to support its development teams. “We’re in the proof-of-concept stage, but we’ve already seen really exciting increases in our overall productivity and improvements in how we onboard new talent,” says McClerren. “We’re excited to continue to explore this, and our developers love to have access to the latest technology.”

One of the most groundbreaking outcomes of the company’s implementation of generative AI is the ability to deliver near real-time, data-driven recommendations to farmers. Conditions on the ground—such as weather, soil moisture, and pest threats—are constantly changing, and generative AI models trained on Bayer Crop Science’s vast data resources are helping farmers to act quickly. “I’m excited about having a scalable data science solution that’s going to continue to incorporate some of the latest, greatest generative AI technology,” says McClerren. “And I’m even more excited about what it means for the farmers we serve—giving them better, faster advice so they can be more successful.”