Shawn Brook

In my three decades in the business of seeds, I’ve seen very few topics complicate a conversation as quickly as intellectual property. Talk to one person and the bigger issue is protection: companies have to be able to protect years, sometimes decades, of investment. Talk to someone else and the conversation quickly turns to access: where will the genetics and biological material needed to build the next innovation come from?

A company brought us in because they had a sales problem. At least, that’s what they thought they had. Their sales numbers were trending in the wrong direction. In my first hour with them, I heard three of their four salespeople say some version of: “We’ve got too much competition. They’re bigger than us/have more salespeople/can offer better incentives. We can’t compete.” That’s exactly why I was there. The leadership team wanted to know what needed to change. Messaging? Sales process?

There’s an old phrase from the early days of computing that we probably need to bring back. Garbage in, garbage out. Put bad information into a computer and you’ll get bad information back out. Somehow, in all the excitement around AI, we’ve forgotten that rule. Everybody wants to know how AI will change sales. I think there’s a more important question: What are you going to feed it? AI needs data. It needs history. It needs information to analyze.