The collaboration brings together agronomic expertise and AI innovation for building accurate crop health, pest forecasting and heat-stress intelligence for farmers in India

At the Bharat Innovates platform in France, inaugurated by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron, IIT Ropar’s ANNAM.AI and Syngenta announced a strategic collaboration to advance AI-powered climate-smart agriculture in India by developing accurate crop health, pest forecasting and heat-stress models, alongside AI-driven decision-support solutions that will enable farmers to make more informed, resilient and data-driven agricultural decisions.

ANNAM.AI, India’s first Centre of Excellence (CoE) for Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture, hosted at IIT Ropar under the Ministry of Education signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Syngenta, a leading global agricultural innovation company, during Bharat Innovates 2026 in Nice, France.

The collaboration will combine Syngenta’s agronomic expertise with ANNAM.AI’s AI innovation to enhance crop health, pest prediction and heat-stress intelligence, and develop next-generation decision-support solutions aimed at improving productivity, strengthening resilience and advancing climate-smart agriculture for the Indian Farmers.

Speaking on the collaboration, Prof Rajeev Ahuja Director IIT Ropar said “Through the support of GOI and valuable steer from our honorable PM Shri Narendra Modi Ji, we are building AI-driven intelligence ecosystem that bridges the gap between research and real-world implementation on the farms. The collaboration between ANNAM.AI and Syngenta further demonstrates the importance of industry-academia partnerships promoting the adoption of next-generation agricultural technologies.”

Dr. Pushpendra Singh, Project Director of ANNAM.AI at IIT Ropar, said: “This partnership with Syngenta combines science and technology with deep agronomic expertise to enable more data-driven and climate-smart farming across India. Our aim to advance accurate crop health, pest forecasting and heat-stress intelligence models that can empower farmers with timely and actionable insights.”

The collaboration between ANNAM.AI and Syngenta further demonstrates the importance of industry-academia partnerships promoting the adoption of next-generation agricultural technologies. It seeks to contribute to a more resilient, sustainable, and technologically enabled farming future by leveraging research excellence, technical innovation, and practical agricultural knowledge.

Jeff Rowe, Syngenta Group’s Chief Executive Officer, said: “At Syngenta we’re creating breakthroughs for farmers in every field, to deliver higher yields with lower impact. ANNAM.AI presents a unique opportunity to contribute to a transformative, digital foundation for Indian agriculture that will benefit more than 600 million people in this country.”

ANNAM.AI at Bharat Innovates 2026 is showcasing its AI ecosystem for agriculture which includes hyperlocal weather systems serving as a next-generation smart weather station which continuously monitors key environmental parameters with high precision; agri-advisory farmer chatbot that delivers timely, hyperlocal agricultural advice, weather updates, and market insights to farmers and a digital decision‑support system that employs an intelligence layer to understand and offer advice for crops, including crop identification, crop damage assessment, and pest management.