Delivering effective AI advisory services to smallholder farmers depends less on model sophistication than on building the underlying ecosystem—shared data infrastructure, consortium economics, localized digital public goods, and farmer trust—without which even the most capable AI repeats the scaling failures of the previous generation of digital agriculture.

Stewart Collis, Senior Program Officer for Digital Solutions in Agricultural Development at the Gates Foundation, has spent over 25 years building and evaluating digital advisory systems for smallholder farmers — from co-founding AWARE's weather advisory service in emerging markets and advancing crop modeling at Texas A&M, to leading digital agriculture strategy at ICRAF before joining the foundation six years ago. At the Gates Foundation, he directs investments across the full adv ...