India, July 29 -- AI detects a farmer's field has been irrigated and automatically shuts off the tubewell. A PepsiCo field agent, sitting hundreds of kilometres away, spots a stressed patch on their dashboard, traces it to a grid of faulty sprinklers and informs the farmer. A grain trader in Punjab scans a wheat sample with a computer vision device and gets a quality report without a lab in sight. This isn't a glimpse of the future. It's already happening, as AI becomes part of everyday farming.

India's agritech story has long been about digitising fragmented parts of farming, from crop monitoring and procurement to storage and advisory services. AI has started to connect those pieces. Instead of simply collecting farm data, it is enabli...