Build an AI Chief of Staff for Your Ag Business

I'm Pat Walther, and I've spent 20 years in agriculture, with an MSc in agronomy, working across the value chain.

It started with a goose-meat venture that reached Switzerland's top supermarkets. Then AGvisorPRO, a social network of 11,000+ farmers and experts. And, separately, a venture training an LLM on equipment manuals, making 3,000-page documents answerable in seconds.

In 2023 I went all in on AI, and now I commercialize it across the ag value chain: voice assistants you talk to from the truck, and chat that answers questions about your own data and handbooks in seconds.

I teach because the leaders who learn to direct AI now, while the stakes are low, will shape the next decade. I want that to be you.

I'm Shane Thomas. Agribusiness is changing at lightning speed, and I treat that as the opportunity of a career, not a threat.

I've worked across ag retail, technical agronomy, sales, marketing, supply chain, and digital and agtech strategy, and led diverse teams through change. In aggregate, those experiences give me a dynamic read on where agriculture is headed and how to shape it.

I write Upstream Ag Insights, the weekly newsletter read by agribusiness leaders across North America, where I dig into the real shifts in the industry and what to do about them.

I operate by a few rules: relentless pursuit of improvement, market obsession, strong opinions loosely held, and outcome over ego.

I'm teaching this with Pat because I've used the system myself, and it changed how I run my own work.