Future Farming in India A Playbook for Scaling Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture 2025

Executive summary Despite this, systemic challenges such as low productivity, fragmented landholdings, limited access to finance and the growing impacts of climate change continue to impede the sector’s potential. Technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), presents an opportunity to address these challenges by enabling smarter, more efficient and more resilient agricultural practices. AI has already shown promising results in Indian agriculture. Pilot projects have demonstrated significant improvements in yields, cost reductions and better market access for farmers. However, scaling these benefits to reach millions of smallholder farmers requires a structured approach that addresses adoption barriers and creates an enabling environment. This report, Future Farming in India: A Playbook for Scaling Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture, offers a roadmap for stakeholders to operationalize AI solutions at scale, making them accessible and impactful for farmers across India. The need for an AI playbook Effective deployment of AI for agriculture at scale faces significant obstacles, including fragmented infrastructure, limited access to high-quality data and affordability concerns for smallholder farmers. These challenges highlight the need for a clear and well- defined framework to guide the development of an AI ecosystem in agriculture. This playbook is designed to help policy-makers strategize and provide achievable insights and practical recommendations to scale the use of AI in agriculture. While the playbook’s primary audience is policy- makers, it is also designed to assist private-sector agribusinesses, agritech start-ups and development organizations in integrating AI into their strategies. Methodology To create a practical and context-sensitive playbook, the World Economic Forum, under the guidance of the AI for India 2030 Advisory Council, constituted a multistakeholder expert group. This group included agronomists, agricultural technologists, policy-makers and agribusiness leaders, ensuring a comprehensive range of perspectives. The methodology for developing the playbook involved three key steps: –Design thinking-driven research to identify innovative AI-based solutions for recurring agricultural challengesThe agricultural sector is a cornerstone of India’s economy, employing nearly 46% of the population and contributing 18% to the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). 01 To offer an overview of potential AI use cases and applications in agriculture and how they can be operationalized02 To present a structured framework based on three critical pillars – enable, create and deliver – with clear guidelines and actions for stakeholders 03 To provide a call to action that leads to a dynamic platform outlining the next steps04 To align AI strategies with ongoing initiatives in India, such as the IndiaAI Mission (MeitY), Agri Stack and state-led AI programmesThe AI for agriculture playbook has four main purposes: Future Farming in India 4