8 December 2025: The AI Agriculture Ecosystem Launch in Abu Dhabi showcased new AI technologies that strengthen farmers' resilience amid a global agricultural crisis.
AgriLLM was presented to Bill Gates alongside CGIAR partners at the UAE Presidential Court, CGIAR, The World Bank, Embrapa, and others. It marked a major milestone in bringing purposeful, domain-focused AI to the people who need it most.
Representing a comprehensive set of AI Building blocks, AgriLLM has pushed its engineering teams to solve some of the hardest problems in applied AI:
🌱 Multi-modal, multilingual LLMs for low-resource environments.
🌱 Retrieval pipelines built for noisy, heterogeneous agricultural data.
🌱 Agentic architectures capable of grounding, reasoning, and planning.
🌱 Safety and evaluation frameworks co-designed with domain experts.
CGIAR is teaming up with AI experts like ai71 to unlock 50 years of global data and expertise in an instant. New AI-powered apps and technologies can provide farmers with immediate, accurate, real-time insights and guidance on planting, weather, early warning, resource management, and more, whenever they need them.
“The AI Agriculture Ecosystem is rooted in science and powered by global collaboration. By combining the AI expertise and insights from global partners, the AI Agriculture Ecosystem can develop innovations that strengthen decision-making, guide policies and investments, and accelerate the adoption of digital tools – supporting vulnerable communities in the Global South and farmers in the Global North facing similar challenges.” Ismahane Elouafi, CGIAR’s Executive Managing Director.
Several other AI breakthroughs were showcased at the Abu Dhabi AI Agriculture Ecosystem Launch, including CGIAR’s new AI Hub. With AI71 - an Abu Dhabi-based artificial intelligence company - as a core partner, the AI Hub is a collaborative digital workspace designed to test, scale, and incubate AI innovations. It acts as a unified, interoperable digital ecosystem where experts from different sectors and disciplines can pool knowledge and collaborate on agricultural solutions, making data accessible and AI-ready.
"The UAE is harnessing artificial intelligence for global good, to help protect the farmers and communities most exposed to climate volatility. By connecting our national research and AI capabilities with leading global partners, we are turning science into real tools that reach people on the ground. Through our partnership with the Gates Foundation, we are advancing Agri-AI solutions that support millions of smallholder farmers facing unpredictable weather, helping secure a more stable and hopeful future for communities worldwide.” Her Excellency Mariam Almheiri, Head of the International Affairs Office at the UAE Presidential Court.
Groundbreaking advances delivered by the AI Hub so far include:
- AgriLLM, an open-source AI model offering multilingual, real-time digital advisory that connects farmers, advisors, and policymakers;
- IWMI’s AI-Water Project that supports water governance, investment and integrated planning to strengthen farmer resilience in the face of droughts and floods - a global dashboard is currently under development for the 2026 UN Water Conference;
- The AI Genebank platform that accelerates crop improvement by rapidly screening hundreds of thousands of plant samples for climate-resilient traits, and then linking them to crop research via an interactive chatbot.
“Partnerships are the cornerstone of food systems transformation. The AI Hub brings together world-leading AI expertise to boost digital capacity, power innovation, and unlock transformative digital tools to support rural farmers on the frontlines of the agricultural crisis.” Sandra Milach
The launch of Abu Dhabi’s AI for Agriculture Ecosystem was a pivotal moment for a global alliance that actively harnesses artificial intelligence to strengthen food security and agricultural resilience worldwide and follows on from the USD 200 million UAE-Gates Foundation partnership announced at COP28 to advance agricultural innovation.
This has resulted in four landmark initiatives:
- the Institute for Agriculture and Artificial Intelligence (IA|AI),
- the CGIAR AI Hub,
- AgriLLM, and
- AIM for Scale.
The AI for Agriculture Ecosystem is founded on an alliance of partnerships between the International Affairs Office at the UAE Presidential Court and four Abu Dhabi-based institutions, working with international partners such as the Gates Foundation, CGIAR, the World Bank, and others.
Related: COP30 session Livestreamed 14 November 2025
AgriLLM is a collaborative AI initiative leveraging advanced language models to expand equitable access to agricultural knowledge worldwide. It is developing a domain-specific large language model (LLM) for agriculture, benchmarked against leading systems and to be released open-source as a public good - bridging research, policy, and field-level impact.
Established by the International Affairs Office at the Presidential Court of the UAE, with AI71 as the technology partner, AgriLLM is co-led by over 15 global partners including CGIAR, EMBRAPA, the Gates Foundation, FAO, IFAD, the World Bank, and ECHO, alongside universities and research centers.
This COP30 session offered an early look at the initiative’s journey so far - what AgriLLM is, how it was designed, and its grounding in scientific knowledge and local realities - as well as a preview of what’s next ahead of its global launch in December 2025.
Date
2025-12-08
