Bill Anderson: Using AI to combat hunger

This episode focuses on how artificial intelligence and other technologies can revolutionize agriculture to combat global hunger.

1. AI can significantly enhance agricultural efficiency by optimizing resource use and crop resilience.
2. Bayer is pioneering in direct-seeded rice, reducing water and greenhouse gas emissions.
3. Genetic engineering in agriculture, despite controversies, plays a crucial role in sustainable food production.
4. Cultural innovation within Bayer focuses on decentralizing decision-making to boost efficiency and innovation.
5. Engaging with the public and stakeholders is essential to gain support for biotechnological advancements in agriculture.

1: Introduction

Brad Smith introduces the podcast theme and guest, Bill Anderson, discussing Bayer's mission and its dual focus on health and hunger.
Brad Smith: "Welcome to Tools and Weapons, today we're exploring how AI can combat global hunger with Bill Anderson of Bayer."

2: AI and Agriculture

Discussion on the application of AI in agriculture to improve decision making and reduce environmental impact.
Bill Anderson: "AI helps us make better decisions on water use and crop protection, directly benefiting farmers' economics and the environment."

3: Innovations in Crop Science

Bill explains Bayer's efforts in genetic engineering, particularly the development of direct-seeded rice.
Bill Anderson: "Direct-seeded rice could dramatically reduce water usage and greenhouse gas emissions, benefiting millions of smallholder farmers."

4: Cultural Shifts at Bayer

Bill discusses organizational changes within Bayer to foster innovation and address global challenges more effectively.
Bill Anderson: "We're empowering our employees to make decisions that align with our mission of 'health for all, hunger for none.'"

1. Support agricultural innovations that use fewer resources.
2. Educate on the benefits of genetic engineering in crops for sustainability.
3. Advocate for AI and technology integration in local farming practices.
4. Encourage dialogue on modern biotechnologies to dispel myths and gain public trust.
5. Invest in companies and initiatives that focus on sustainable and efficient food production.

Bayer CEO Bill Anderson considers himself a scientist at heart, a chemical engineer by training, and a lifelong student of biotechnology. Now at the helm of a 160-year-old German pharmaceutical and agriculture company, he's employing science and technology with a bold mission — Health for All, Hunger for none.
In this episode, Bill discusses AI’s role in accelerating agricultural breakthroughs that are needed to feed a a growing population, including helping smallholder farmers become more resilient to climate change. And he discusses how this intersection of science and technology is empowering employees to unblock innovation within the company.

People

Bill Anderson, Brad Smith

Companies

Bayer

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Guest Name(s):

Bill Anderson

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Brad Smith

I'm Brad Smith, and this is tools and weapons. On this podcast, I'm sharing conversations with leaders who are at the intersection of the promise and the peril of the digital age. We'll explore technology's role in the world as we look for new solutions for society's biggest challenges.

Bill Anderson

The way that our food comes to our table, I think, is often overlooked. We just think, well, you know, just, food comes from the grocery store, and it's like, wow. Actually, it's quite an endeavor. It involves hundreds of millions of farmers around the world that do great work, but an amazing amount of technology as well. That's Bill Anderson, the CEO leading the german pharmaceutical giant bear.

Born in Texas and trained at both University of Texas Austin and MIT, bill considers himself a scientist at heart, a chemical engineer by training, and a lifelong student of biotechnology. People all over the world know Bayer for drugs like Aspirin, the one 60 year old company's trademark product that people still depend on today. But providing health for all is only half of Bayer's mission. The other half is hunger for none. In this conversation, Bill and I discuss how the company is using artificial intelligence paired with CRISPR technology to increase food production without fertilizers.

Their efforts put AI and digital tools in the hands of farmers to get the most out of every acre on a hotter, more crowded planet. And Bill shares how he's instilling a renewed culture of innovation and empowerment at a company that has been in business since the US president Abraham Lincoln was. In the White House. To hear more conversations like this one, I invite you to follow or subscribe to the podcast, wherever you're listening. Now my conversation with Bill Anderson, up next on tools and weapons.

Well, thank you, Bill. Bill Anderson, CEO of Bayer, or Bayer, as is called in Germany, where the company is based. You, I think, have a fascinating job. You started last year, CEO of a company that has been around literally since Abraham Lincoln was president of the United States and is now at the forefront of addressing some of the world's most pressing and important challenges. Literally, how do we feed the world?

But as I'm seeing you, what our listeners can't see, there is a poster on your wall with the word aspirin. That's how Bayer got started. Tell us about the history of the company you're now leading. Yeah. Well, thanks, Brad, and really great to be here with you and your listeners.

Bill Anderson

Yeah, it's a fascinating company. Last year was the 160th anniversary, and it's a company that has contributed so many things over the years, including the great product aspirin, which is actually the buyer trade name. And that's probably one of the most widely used medicines. That's also one of the oldest that we're using today. I mean, obviously, there are many medicines that predate that, but of the modern era, we have people in three main areas.

We have that consumer health products, which includes things like aspirin, but also many other common remedies that we sort of take for granted. But it's kind of a big deal that you can go down to the local drugstore, the pharmacy, or the grocery store and buy things to help you with health issues. And we take it for granted in the west, but we're working to make those products available to 100 million additional people over the coming few years. In countries around the world where they don't necessarily have that ability to do that, we think, oh, I have a headache, let me get some aspirin. We take it for granted, but we're working to bring that around the world.

We have a pharmaceutical R and D enterprise that's working on novel medicines, including things like the leading treatment for prostate cancer in the US now, many other serious diseases, blood clots, things like this. And then we also have a whole other part of the world knows about, is we're the largest provider of agricultural inputs in the world. So this is seeds and crop protection, chemicals and digital farming solutions. The way that our food comes to our table, I think, is often overlooked. We just think, well, food comes from the grocery store, and it's like, wow.

Actually, it's quite an endeavor. It involves hundreds of millions of farmers around the world that do great work, but an amazing amount of technology as well. And Bayer is the leader in agricultural technology in the world today. I want to get into all of that, but first, I'd love to hear a little bit about you. You were born in a very small town in Texas.

You grew up in Texas. You've said on LinkedIn that you consider yourself a scientist at heart, a chemical engineer by training, and a lifelong student of biotechnology. But how did a kid from Texas end up as the CEO of such an important global company based in Germany? I went to school at the University of Texas. I studied chemical engineering, and after I got out, I worked a few roles in the chemical industry.

Bill Anderson

I went back to grad school, and when I was at grad school, I came across biotechnology. And I thought, this is amazing. I mean, we can splice genes, you know, we can change cells so that we can fix the cells that have gone wrong in a human body or we can, you know, we can program a cell to produce a protein that's very beneficial. And I want to be a part of this. I think this is going to be increasingly important in the world.

And so I got my first job in biotechnology in 1997. And, yeah, I've been sort of at it ever since. It's just a. It's an amazing thing, what we can do today. And the rate at which technology is advancing is probably just as dramatic or even more dramatic as it is in the field of semiconductors and software.

So it's a life passion.

One of the things I love about bear is the mission that you've defined as health for all, hunger for none. We have 8 billion people on planet Earth today. All of the projections say that in our lifetime, that'll reach 10 billion people. And just feeding the world is becoming a bigger challenge. We'll dive into your solutions.

But can you say a little bit about how you and your colleagues at Bayer think about the problems that you're there to solve and the mission that creates for every employee? Yeah, for sure. We have a mission statement at Bayer that is very near and dear to all our employees hearts, which is health for all, hunger for none. And it's a very bold statement, and I think we all realize that it's probably not fully attainable in our lifetimes. But I can assure you that's not just something for the website.

Bill Anderson

In fact, when I arrived, one of the first questions I got from many people I encountered was, you're not going to change the mission, are you? You're not going to change the mission. But I took that opportunity to ask people about it, why is it so important to you? What does it mean to you? And basically said, yeah, it provides incredible clarity.

That's what we're here for. And it puts everything else into context. And by the way, we can come back to this, but I think it's really important to have a mission like that because we have so many competing opportunities, competing demands on our time. And when you have a clear mission like that, it helps you say no to a lot of things and focus on what's most important. But how we think about it.

Let me take the part about hunger for none. We don't have that today in the world. And I know, you know, maybe in the west, and we have obesity epidemic, and people might think, oh, food security is not really a big issue. You know, for hundreds of millions of people in the world today, right now, food security is not a term. It's reality.

It's, hey, am I going to be able to feed my kids today? And unfortunately, often the answer is no. And that got actually worse over the last few years with the war in Ukraine, with the effect of the pandemic. So this is no idle thing. This is no trivial matter.

And it gets worse because not only do we need to feed, for example, 2 billion more people, but we probably need to do it with less arable land, because, unfortunately, cropland is being depleted. By the way, cropland also competes with forest land, which we need to combat global warming and to absorb carbon. We also are losing water supply in many key agricultural areas in the world. The water supply is dwindling. Cropland's coming out of production, and we've got to do it arguably with less chemicals and reduce amounts of, say, fertilizer and other things that can pollute.

This is a big problem, and that's the nature of our problem. And we have the largest R and D efforts in the world on this. But basically, how can we produce more corn, more rice, more soybeans, more other essential foodstuffs with less land, less water, less need for other interventions? I think you've just defined one of the most expansive and fundamental challenges for our generation of people. And one of the things that is interesting is your reference to the mission.

Same mission, but I think you're taking bear into a new chapter. In fact, I was struck when you were named CEO. The chair of the supervisory board of the company said that they were looking to you. They saw you as the ideal candidate, together with this team, to lead bear into what was called a new, successful chapter. A time of disruptive innovation, a disruptive innovation cycle in biology, in chemistry, and in artificial intelligence.

So now we're talking about a challenge that is literally older than civilization, the need to feed people with the newest generation of technology. How do you see these intersecting? Oh, wow. I see amazing examples of this on a regular basis here. I'll give you just a couple examples.

Bill Anderson

So we are the largest provider of corn seeds in the world, and the corn that's going to be grown this spring, that's going to be planted this spring is not the same as the corn seeds that were planted two or three years ago, by the way. The corn seed that's being planted in Iowa is not the same as the corn seed that's being planted in Brazil or Argentina or Germany or Ukraine. And we, as part of our efforts in corn seed, we're creating about 50,000 new genetic variants of corn seed per year. Now, what do you do with 50,000 new genetic variants? Well, one thing, you have to characterize them genetically, which means you have to be able to take a sample from a seed of corn that's large enough to do a full genomic characterization, but small enough that it doesn't harm the viability of the seed.

So imagine doing that for 50,000. It's like we just did the human genome a couple decades ago. It took hundreds of thousands of person years of effort, and now we're basically doing this 50,000 times a year in corn alone. Another example, crop protection. Chemicals, crops around the world, they have threats from fungus, from insects, and from weeds.

And those three factors, fungi, insects, weeds, they can reduce the yield of the crops up to, well, up to 100%, but quite frequently, 60, 70, 80% yield loss. And we need new approaches, because those three forces they evolve, insects evolve. They evolve resistance to insecticides, fungi, they evolve resistance to fungicide, and so on. And so we have to kind of stay one step ahead. And in order to do that, we're using machine learning models that are modeling, like, up to 18 parameters, looking at the chemistry of novel compounds to try to predict if you have a compound library of, let's say, a billion chemicals, which hundred of the billion might have certain properties that are advantageous, for example, if they break down easily in the natural environment, that they would harm harmful insects, but not good insects and so on.

So it's an amazing coming together of sort of the natural with technology for feeding the world.

You are bringing new technology that people may not be familiar with, the notion of splicing a gene to grow a better crop. At one level, I can understand why people, when they hear about artificial intelligence, their first reaction is, well, I don't really want artificial anything. Why would I want artificial intelligence or modified? Why would I want the most natural things in the world to be modified by science and technology? But there's a very clear reality.

You take a continent like Africa, 1.3 billion people, a growing population. It has the capacity, with the kinds of technologies that Bayer is developing, to not only feed itself, but export food to the world. And yet today, it is a continent that has to import food. It has countries that face real hunger. And so, literally, technology is the difference maker.

But it does require a conversation. How do you think about the work that you need to do that bear, maybe, that all of us that invent technology need to do to talk with the world, so they understand this technology and give them the confidence that it will be used? Well, yeah, yeah. That's a very important topic. And unfortunately, with the original introduction of genetically modified plant organisms, I don't think the communications was not nearly sufficient.

Bill Anderson

So we have a situation today where, for example, biotechnology in human health is widely accepted. We have countless cures for various cancers, for many other serious diseases. I've had the privilege of being involved in developing a number of those over the years, and these are life changers. And nobody's protesting the use of monoclonal antibodies to provide solutions for people with multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis or lung cancer. Nobody's protesting that.

But many people are concerned about genetically modified organisms in the food chain. And it's very unfortunate, because at the advent of these technologies, one could reasonably ask questions about, hey, what is the effect of this? Might something go wrong? But here we are now, 30 years after the introduction of the first genetically modified plants into food production. And what we've seen is tremendous benefits in terms of yields, in terms of reducing the need for various pesticides, making plants more drought tolerant, and a whole number of benefits.

And in fact, we're literally feeding the world based on these technologies. But we still have many people with kind of a bad feeling about it. And so we have an opportunity certainly to do a better job explaining this and what measures are being taken to ensure safety and to ensure that we stay in the positive side.

Ultimately, in order to feed the world, you have to reach the world. And I'd like to ask you about a couple of aspects of that. I mean, the first is you create products that are used by farmers. One of the things, Bill, I know you're focused on at bear is what are called smallholder farmers. And I think these are people who have farms with 25 acres or less, and yet they account for 97% of the farmers in the world.

There's 550 million smallholder farmers, especially in the lower and middle income countries, in a world now with increasingly ubiquitous, not complete, but increasingly ubiquitous Internet access, in a world where AI can be put to work. I know that one of the things our two companies are working on together is how to harness the power of data to help even smallholder farmers in every part of the world. What do you see as the future of data for helping, say, a farmer with a smaller plot of land? Well, for sure, think of things like helping farmers to make better decisions about which type of seed to plant, about how much water they need to apply. And this can relate to weather prediction, which is obviously an area where AI has made huge strides in recent years.

Bill Anderson

But also, even with a given set of weather, circumstances, how much water is needed? What other tools might be required? Is a chemical crop protection? Does it need to be applied or not? And right now, a lot of times, farmers are needing to apply insecticides, pesticides of other sorts, sort of proactively, because they're not sure and they don't want to take a chance and be too late.

So we might be able to use technologies to better predict, hey, actually, maybe you don't need to use a crop protection treatment at this point, and you can wait. So there's a lot. And by the way, those things, those are good for the environment, but they're really good for the farmer's economics if they can defer use of certain inputs that cost money. For many people in the world, perhaps the most basic staple of their diet is rice. And at a time where water is under stress, rice actually accounts for 43% of the world's total irrigation water.

In terms of the techniques used to grow rice today, it even accounts for one and a half percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. You're focused on changing that with what I understand is called direct seeded rice. Tell us what that is and tell us what you're doing. Yeah, yeah. So rice farming, the old traditional method, has a couple challenges.

Bill Anderson

One is it takes a lot of water, and in many places, we're being challenged about how much water is available. Right. Second, using water as a herbicide, you basically, you choke. You drown the plants with water, but then they ferment. They basically rot under the water.

And when they do that anaerobically, they produce methane instead of carbon dioxide. And of course, that's a problem because methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So we have an approach called direct seeded rice that would work in many of these countries, would allow smallholder farmers to produce rice. So we're looking at, like 40% less water, 45% lower greenhouse gas emissions, and something that also can be a labor saver, because in many of these countries, they used to have large families, and they could have the children sort of transplanting the seedlings from one plot to another. The reason it's called direct seeded is you can put it straight out in the fields, and it also lowers the labor requirements, which is part of helping smallholders move beyond subsistence, that they could actually have an opportunity to better their economic life.

And it's big news for 150 million smallholder farmers around the world who grow. Rice in a similar way for any of us who remember our high school chemistry and biology. And I have to admit, on many days, I'm probably pressed to do that. We can recall that plants need nitrogen to grow. Nitrogen is abundant in the air, but plants don't produce it themselves, hence the need for fertilizer.

And for more than a century, science has been advancing fertilizer. In fact, two germans won the Nobel Prize for this in the 20th century. But you're taking it into new terrain entirely with your focus on AI and gene editing. What are you trying to do and how are you trying to do it? Yeah, so the key here is, as you said, there's lots of nitrogen available in the air, but it's not the kind.

Bill Anderson

It's n two. It's nitrogen molecules. They're not available for easy absorption by plants, by most plants. But certain kinds of plants called legumes, like beans, soybeans, would be an example of this. They actually have a certain kind of bacteria that kind of cohabit their root structures.

And these bacteria can basically process the n two and convert it into a form of nitrogen that is accessible to the plants and can nourish them. Partners that we're working with, like ginkgo bioworks, we're basically programming the bacteria that can work with the plant root system and convert nitrogen so that you could have a plant like corn that doesn't produce nitrogen, actually producing some of its own nitrogen, and replacing conventional fertilizer. Fertilizer that has huge implications for things like nitrification, which is a type of pollution that happens with nitrogen fertilizer runoff into rivers and bodies of water. But also nitrogen fertilizer production is a huge user of energy, and to be able to sort of harness bacteria to do that work is potentially a big impact on greenhouse gas emissions. It's, again, another example of how biology and advances in biotechnology can help us on a road to a more sustainable future.

So here we are talking about, literally a human need that predates, I would be willing to bet, even the ability of humans to speak. They had to be able to eat, they had to find food. Now we have the latest technology that humanity has ever devised, and I think it also requires a lot of culture change within organizations and beyond. As you've come to take the helm of Bayer, how are you thinking about first within the organization you lead the role of culture and what you need to help people move forward to address? Yeah, obviously a huge topic.

Bill Anderson

About seven, eight years ago, I started to put a lot of thought into that question because I was noticing this real dichotomy in the world that you have small companies, startups, with an amazing kind of vitality and then you had big companies with 810 even more layers. And I don't think you describe, you wouldn't use the word vitality to describe them. And so my question was, hey, is this just an inevitable consequence of being big? Is that you have to settle for this sort of soul crushing bureaucracy, or can it be better? And, you know, I started looking around, by the way, if I asked 100 people that question, I think probably 95 said, yeah, that's the conundrum.

And you really can't. There's not much to do about it. But there were a few who pointed me to some really unusual companies who were doing things very differently. And that started a really important journey for me. And, you know, one of the extreme examples, you know, you should check it out if you have a chance.

There's a company in the Netherlands to called Bourtzorg. Why don't you spell the name of the company for those of us listening so we can look it up? Yeah, it's b u u r t z o r g. I think. I think that's it.

That has 16,000 employees and two managers. Wow, that does sound rather extreme. Yeah, but maybe think about it this way. Ask yourself, okay, so if you have 16,000 employees and two managers, who do you think does budgeting and planning? The two managers or the 16,000?

I would say the two managers are rather outnumbered, so they better have some other people doing that. Who do you think decides when it's time to hire a new person for the team? Who do you think? I hope it's not just the two. Exactly.

Bill Anderson

Exactly. So basically, the answer to every question is the people, right? In other words, the people make 99.9% of all decisions in that company. And the two managers. Yeah, probably make, I don't know, approximately 0.01% of the decisions.

And then you say, well, how is that possible? And can we do that in a different environment? And so I started to experiment with this, I and my colleagues, and found out, yeah, you know what? There's a whole lot more we can do. Putting decision making into the hands of the people doing the work.

And to be clear, this isn't about, like, oh, we just hire great people and turn them loose. Have you ever heard that expression? Oh, yeah, that's a frequently used expression. Total nonsense. Total nonsense.

Okay. If you have a hundred thousand person company, you can't just turn people loose, because it would be chaos and anarchy. It would last for about a week, and then people would say, hey, you know, this is crazy. This is madness. Bring us back the hierarchy.

Okay. But basically, what it is, you implement a system that allows the people doing the work to make 95% of the decisions without ten layers of hierarchy. And that's a whole nother story. But that's basically what we're doing at Bayer. And so say a little bit more, because first of all, I've always thought people don't like bureaucracy, and it turns out they don't like anarchy either, because both make it very difficult to make decisions.

I'm guessing that you haven't come to bear and decided you're only going to have two managers. So how are you taking that concept, which you can learn from, and call it a more almost radical way, and bringing it into a company like bear? Yeah, for sure. So, as you said, the example in the Netherlands is a specific case where it's a company providing home nursing services. And so while every patient they help is different, the work has a certain commonality.

Bill Anderson

They're nurses, and so they're able to come up with a rather simple set of rules and processes that everyone follows. And then within that, hey, they have kind of maximum freedom and autonomy. So a company like Bayer, where we have thousands of products and hundreds of countries, there's not like a ten page guidebook, and then everyone can go, just do it. But it's a radical relook at every process. And so you have to redesign how work gets done so that it takes the manager out of 95% of the decision making.

And so the managers become what we call visionary, architect, catalyst, and coach. So there's no reviewing and approving. In a typical hierarchical bureaucracy, the managers exist to review and approve stuff. We take that out and say, no. The workers review and approve.

I mean, they create the ideas and they decide on them, and they go, the role of the many fewer managers is to make sure that they've got a system by which good decisions can be made, that the decisions can kind of flow across teams, and that there's a continuity with the system. But anyway, I'm giving you a little window into it. What is the role in that setting of something like communication? Because I would surmise that perhaps one of the keys to making it work is people having shared context, shared vision. As you said, people are visionaries for a manager, or certainly for you as the CEO, does it make communication itself something that is a bigger part of the job?

Yeah, that's the key part of that vision part. And making sure in every part of the organization, and there will still be leaders. We need leaders. We're not going to two. We'll have many leaders, but their role isn't to set the priorities and cascade them, but rather the workers who are closest to the customer, closest to the product.

They are deciding things, they're seeing the opportunities, they're making decisions, they're deploying resources. And the role of the leaders is to provide the vision, the overarching approach we call architecture. And there's a lot of communication involved in that. Let me just say thank you. Thank you for spending the time with me today.

Thank you for helping us all get a little bit of a glimpse into the world in the company you're leading. But most importantly, thank you for what you and your colleagues at Bear are doing. Because truly, the mission has never been more important than it is today. My pleasure, Brad. Thanks very much.

Bill Anderson

And yeah, until next time, you've been. Listening to tools and weapons with me, Brad Smith. If you enjoyed today's show, please follow us wherever you like to listen.

Brad Smith

Our executive producers are Carol Ann Browd and Aaron Teasey. This episode of Tools and Weapons was produced by Karina Hernandez and Jordan Rothline. This podcast is edited and mixed by Jenny Cataldo with production support by Sam Kirkpatrick at Run Studios. Original music by Angular Wave Research Tools and Weapons is a production of Microsoft made in partnership with Lissip.