One of the more buzzworthy terms in the consumer business world is Internet of Things, or IoT for short. While a bit ambiguous, the IoT trend is taking off with integrated voice activation tools and in agriculture with companies moving conceptual designs into commercial development.

Wrapped around the goal of smarter farming, IoT’s application in agriculture is rooted in integration, simplicity and efficiency.

But how far along is agriculture in its adoption of IoT concepts and what does the future hold for development of these progressive platforms?

Talking recently with several precision manufacturers, there wasn’t a consensus on how to currently define IoT in agriculture. But companies had a clearer sense of the potential that packaging products and services can provide for both dealers and customers.

Fabio Isaia, CEO of Topcon, discussed the opportunity to transition into a more integrated delivery model for hardware and software, through brand consolidation rather than viewing them as independent precision pieces.       

“We are rebuilding our software to be pieced as a vertical application of the platform and we’re going to sell them as subscriptions instead of license. So it’s a big transformation and this is what we believe is going to happen everywhere. We see the big manufacturers are trying to go that way, so the market eventually will go that way. I mean everything now is connected. We are all connected. We are now going to use these applications ourselves like normal consumer people and we believe that in the interim every agriculture market will follow as well. This is exactly what they’re doing now.”

Isaia added that one of the transitional challenges will be getting some dealers to change their mindset on how they sell and service precision platforms going forward, emphasizing that collaboration will be increasingly essential to adoption of IoT tools.