Fischer Wildfire Disaster Assistance Bill Becomes Law. AI in Agriculture Won’t Replace Farmers: It’ll Upgrade Them. # AI in Agriculture Won’t Replace Farmers: It’ll Upgrade Them. But when Rob Saik looks at how AI is landing on the farm and ranch, he sees something very different from the anxiety driving those stories. In a wide-ranging conversation on Agriculture of America, Saik — a lifelong ag-tech pioneer whose career spans agronomy, precision ag, robotics, and now AI — made the case that farmers have less to fear and more to gain than most of the coverage suggests. At the farm and ranch level, he sees relatively little displacement on the horizon — in part because most producers are already short on labor, not looking to shed it. One of Saik’s most useful frameworks is the split between the two halves of any decision: prediction and judgment. Where Saik gets most animated is the idea of AI as an operating system for the whole operation.