By Mark Jarman & Mark Hodgson
Over the last twelve months, AgriTIERRA and Earthbase have worked closely with teams across the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT on three digital initiatives that underpin climate-smart breeding, trials and decision making across CGIAR:
Individually, these initiatives reflect the Alliance’s role as a delivery, innovation and integration hub within CGIAR’s digital agenda. Taken together, they point to a broader institutional opportunity for CGIAR: a shift from stand-alone digital projects towards a coherent portfolio positioning the system as a global leader in climate-smart breeding, participatory trials and resilience-led decision support.
Our mandate was not to optimise individual, standalone tools. It was to provide strategic insight, operational analysis and decision-ready recommendations to support a broader shift from projects to scalable, venture-ready digital assets.
This work focused on critical requirements for the Alliance:
To answer these questions, we went deep across science, delivery realities, commercial opportunities, technical architecture, and institutional constraints, working with individuals and teams in East Africa, Latin America, Europe, Southeast Asia and the UK.
The conclusion was consistent across all three initiatives:
Primary drivers vs “ limiting” factors are no longer technical, they are institutional.
Artemis represents a step-change in how under-resourced breeding programmes can access digital phenotyping. What began as a technical innovation has matured into a field-tested capability combining computer vision, large language models and practical, low-friction workflows.
Crucially, Artemis has shown that AI-enabled phenotyping can work in real breeding environments, not just controlled research settings.
Our strategic focus with Artemis
Once technical feasibility was established, our work shifted to venture readiness:
Artemis has reached a clear inflection point.
As Lennart Woltering (Sustainable Innovation and Transformation Lead under Digital Inclusion at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT) reflected:
“What really distinguished AgriTIERRA’s support was the depth they went to. They took the time to understand Artemis in detail, not just the technology, but the science, the team, the operational realities and the institutional context. That depth meant their insights were grounded, credible and genuinely useful for decision making.”
He added:
“The analysis was evidence-driven and based on how Artemis actually works in the field and within the Alliance. That allowed for clear, practical recommendations, not generic frameworks.”
And finally:
“Many advisors talk about governance or business models in general terms. AgriTIERRA connected those questions directly to our science, our users and our constraints as an Alliance. That combination is rare and it has materially sharpened our thinking.”
Alongside Artemis, we supported two core digital platforms that underpin climate-smart breeding, trials and decision making across CGIAR.
ClimMob is a globally deployed participatory trials platform, used to design, manage and analyse on-farm trials with farmers, breeders, NGOs and national research systems across Africa, Latin America and Asia. It provides the backbone for farmer-centred experimentation, feedback and learning at scale.
The Climate Resilience Platform (CRP) provides climate intelligence, risk analysis and decision-support tools to help researchers, practitioners and policymakers understand climate impacts and adaptation options across crops, regions and production systems.
Although they serve different user groups, our work showed that their strategic challenges were strikingly similar.
Both platforms are:
Our work across both platforms focused on:
Viewed together, ClimMob and CRP highlight a single strategic challenge for the Alliance: how to move from a collection of successful tools to a coherent digital services portfolio that can scale responsibly while retaining public-good value.
Tiffany Talsma, CRP Lead reflected on the value of the work from a CRP perspective:
“AgriTIERRA helped us clarify long-term ownership, governance and financing models for CRP, moving our thinking beyond grant-dependent delivery towards a durable digital service. Their work connected impact measurement, donor confidence and sustainability in a practical way, giving us clearer options for how CRP can operate and grow within the Alliance over the long term.”
Jacob van Etten, Research Director & ClimMob Lead, Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT noted:
“AgriTIERRA helped us define the commercial, governance, and delivery models needed to take ClimMob and CRP from early-stage tools to scalable digital services. Their structured approach provided clear pathways for spin-out, revenue generation, and stakeholder engagement, while preserving open-access public good principles.”
Across regions and platforms, five consistent insights emerged:
The level of analytical depth, cross-platform understanding and institutional awareness required to unlock this opportunity goes well beyond traditional project support. There is now space to explore new forms of collaboration that operate at a portfolio and institutional level, aligning science, governance, digital infrastructure, partnerships and long-term sustainability through a coherent digital services partner strategy and programme for engaging aligned research, science and technology, commercial, and funding collaborators to scale CGIR’s core capabilities.
Artemis, ClimMob and CRP show that the Alliance can deliver digital innovation that is scientifically credible and globally relevant. Our work illustrates how targeted, evidence-led strategic insight can support a future strategic shift, shaped by the Alliance’s priorities, where strategic coherence, institutional alignment and ecosystem collaboration will be critical.
The next phase is not about building more tools. It is about enabling those that already exist to scale responsibly and sustainably. The insights generated through this work provide a practical foundation for that transition.
We look forward to continuing the dialogue as the Alliance considers how best to position digital innovation as a durable, long-term asset within CGIAR.
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