Observations From First Day of Ag View Executive Business Conference
We provide our observations
Yesterday was the first day of the Ag View Executive Business Conference. I have attended all of the conferences (5 in total) and spoken at all but one.
Our first speaker was Vance Crowe who spoke on “Steelmanning: How to Navigate Uncomfortable Ideas”. His background was interesting. He had interviewed with Monsanto to be the Millennial Liaison with no intent to taking the job and actually ended up with the job.
One of the key thoughts that I took away was not to ask a person why you did something when they did something “wrong” but rather ask them “how”. When we ask why the person gets defensive or tries to defend their position. But if you ask how they did something, it deescalates the situation and it is much easier to get to a solution.
The next speaker was myself and I discussed how the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will affect their farm operation.
After that we had an hour and half of networking.
After lunch Dick Wittman spoke on Positioning Your Financial and Managerial Processes for Growth and Succession. However, I had to take an hour call, so I missed that session.
The next speaker was Shay Foulk who is part of the Ag View team, and he spoke on Military to Management: Perspective, Patience, and Planning. Shay decided to enlist in the Army right out of college and trained to become part of the Army Rangers. He gave a great presentation on how that training can help with management.
Finally, Scott Klososky spoke on Synthetic Intelligence in a Tangible Farming World. Part of the presentation was the speed of the AI Flywheel. During 2025, AI accomplished the following:
Large Reasoning Models (not just language models)
GPT, Agent, Bot platforms
Embodied AI Models (Figure)
Google Notebook LM
AI Search Options (Perplexity, ChatGPT, Google)
Deep Research Capabilities
New AI Training Techniques (DeepSeek, Alibaba)
World Models (Video & Graphics)
ChatGPT 5.2, Claude 4.5, Gemini 3.0 (these change about every 45 days)
MCP, Agent to Agent, ACP, AP2
The rate of change is massive, and currently human intelligence is still ahead of AI intelligence. However, Scott presented an interesting way to look at it.
Assume you have two people with a 110 IQ. One does not use AI, and one uses it. The one who uses it now has an IQ of 150 increasing as they use it to 165. The one who does not use it stays at 110. However, the one that uses it may see their IQ drop to 100 from AI dependence, but overall, their IQ is now at 155. A very interesting perspective and I will now start to use AI even more than I do now.
Also, Shay had spent 3 hours using Claude to develop a management spreadsheet with a dashboard interface that took several of his current messy spreadsheets and developed a tool that farmers can use. The key is anybody can quickly get up to speed and use AI effectively (even us people age 60 or older).
The key is learning how to prompt AI.
All-in-all a great first day to the conference and I would highly recommend it for farmers to attend next year.