#93 Dan Kurdys: AI, CRISPR and Smarter Crops for a Changing Climate

Описание: Dan Kurdys joins the PreVetted Podcast to explore how AI, CRISPR, and modern plant science can help crops – and the people who depend on them – keep up with a changing climate. As Executive Vice President of Business Development at Pairwise and former Global Business Lead for GenAI at Bayer Crop Science, he works where agriculture and deep tech meet, focused on turning science into real products for farmers and families.

Using the blight-stricken Earth of Interstellar as a starting point, Dan explains why that Hollywood scenario is exaggerated, but why the risk behind it is real if agriculture becomes complacent while nature keeps evolving. He shares his early days walking cornfields in Michigan with a punch card and carbon-copy forms, contrasted with the robotics and vision systems he saw in pharmaceutical plants. A story about his tool-and-die-maker grandfather leads to a key idea that runs through the episode: you don’t start with a shiny tool like AI or CRISPR, you start with the problem and then pick the right tool for it.

Dan describes Pairwise’s mission as making plants easier to grow and easier to eat. He and Federico talk about picky kids, pitless cherries, seedless blackberries, and compact plants that produce more fruit per acre. With the analogy of editing a long document, Dan explains how CRISPR lets scientists “find and edit” specific parts of a plant’s genome to improve traits such as plant architecture, flowering time, yield, and resilience. The same approach can help move crops to regions with better water access, make them more resource, efficient, and finally bring serious innovation to under, served crops like avocados and cacao that never had big breeding programs behind them.

The second half of the conversation focuses on AI as the other big lever. Agriculture today is drowning in data, Dan says, but the real challenge is turning that data into insight at the exact moment a decision must be made. He talks about specialized AI agents that can pull in the right context, reduce errors in complex, weather-driven systems, and act as force multipliers for agronomists in the field and scientists in R&D, while partnerships help extend these tools to smallholder farmers and regional crops.

Throughout the episode, Dan comes back to trust, mission, and impact. People trust what they can see and taste, so a great product experience plus transparency beats any technical lecture. The best AI plus biology plus business teams he has seen are united by a shared mission rather than an org chart, with mutual accountability pushing everyone to raise their game.

About Dan Kurdys:
https://www.pairwise.com/
  / dankurdys  

About Federico Ramallo ✨👨‍💻🌎
🚀 Software Engineering Manager | 🛠 Founder of DensityLabs.io & PreVetted.ai | 🤝 Connecting 🇺🇸 U.S. teams with top nearshore 🌎 LATAM engineers
💼   / framallo  
🌐 https://densitylabs.io
✅ https://prevetted.ai

🎙 PreVetted Podcast 🎧📡
🎯 https://prevetted.ai/podcast
🐦 https://x.com/PrevettedPod
🔗   / prevetted-podcast  

00:00 Introduction to Agricultural Innovation
02:52 The Role of Technology in Agriculture
05:47 Personal Journey into Agriculture
08:19 Understanding Pearwise and CRISPR Technology
10:40 The Future of Food: Making Produce Fun
13:35 CRISPR: Editing the Genetic Code
16:10 Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change
18:32 From Concept to Field: The Journey of Crop Innovation
20:19 Impact of AI on Agriculture
26:08 AI and Gene Editing for Smallholder Farmers
28:21 Balancing Traits in Crop Development
31:05 Building Trust in Technology
32:17 Regulatory Frameworks and Innovation
34:50 CRISPR vs. GMO: A New Era
37:10 The Role of Context in AI
38:49 Creating High-Performance Teams
41:21 Future of Food: A Vision for 10 Years