Is John Deere an Underrated AI Stock?

John Deere's (DE -1.86%) new autonomous tractor is equipped with an Nvidia graphics card and can be controlled by farmers with a smartphone app. In this Backstage Pass clip from "The AI/ML Show" recorded on Jan. 12, Motley Fool contributors Toby Bordelon, Jamie Louko, and Jose Najarro discuss this fascinating new use for AI technology. 

Toby Bordelon: At CES, John Deere comes out with this autonomous tractor. They reveal their autonomous tractor and we've known this is in the works for a while. They've been talking about this. But they've got this autonomous tractor, they hope to have it in production by this year, by the end of the year, if you are a farmer, you can go buy it and put it in your field. I was going to a show video, we don't have time for that, but I do encourage you to go to John Deere's website. Let me just screen share this real quickly so you can see this. If you want to go to their website. They have a whole. You got to johndeere.com. You're going to see, learn more about John Deere CES right here. You can click there and it takes you to their CES where they've got videos from CES they have got resources. They've got factsheets on there. So you can learn more about this area. Watch these videos, they are really cool.

But this tractor, it's just a regular John Deere tractor but it's autonomous. It uses 12 pairs of cameras and GPS. No RADAR, no LiDAR. This is more like Tesla. They are just using the cameras for this one. It can carry a plow behind it, it can tow other equipment. It uses a smartphone app for the farmer to control it. Very simple, basic smartphone app. The tractor also has sensors for data gathering, so while it's out plowing the field, you can gather data as well.

Jose, it uses an Nvidia card. Nvidia Jetson Xavier GPU is what is powering this John Deere tractor. But they took it. It's not totally off-the-shelf, they took it and they made a custom passive cooling assembly that actually is optimized for the dusty field environments, because the typical air coolers won't work. If you're out of the farm, just get clogged up. They put a custom cooling unit on that, but it's an Nvidia graphics card, GPU power in this thing.

We talked on a previous show about Blue River, which is the John Deere subsidiary. They are working on AI farming tech, including an AI-powered weeding device. You can stick that on the back of the tractors. You can autonomously weed your field too with this. Now the advantage, part of what Bradley talks about is what if the camera fails, what's the redundancy?

The advantage to this tractor over say the Tesla system is, if it encounters something it can't figure out, it just stops, and it'll ping the farmer in the smartphone app and he goes and deals with it. But it's in the field. So it's not a problem. It's not like, "Oh, what if something happened at 75 miles an hour on the freeway?" That's a bigger concern. What if something happens to the tractor at five miles an hour plowing the field with no one else there, who cares? You can fix that. That can be dealt with half an hour later, the consequences of catastrophic failure are a lot lower I think, when you're plowing a field than you're driving a car in an environment with a bunch of other people.

I think that's one reason that we may be seeing this come to market very quickly. Because the very controlled, constrained environment in which is being used. It's interesting, and is fascinating. Again, go to the website checkout these videos, we're going to talk more about this on a later show. It's a very fascinating piece of equipment there. You talk about growing populations and John Deere talks about this, need to increase productivity. They save by 16, 17 percent to feed everyone. But the average farmer in the US they were 55. Labor shortage on farms like everyone else, but increasingly on farms. What you do with that, autonomy can help with some of these concerns. Potentially, letting family farms continue to operate these family farms. Because you just need fewer hands. If you can plow your field with a tractor while you go do other things. Tractors do its thing. Interesting, fascinating, and we'll see if these actually makes to the market this year, but I hope they do, it's quite fascinating. Any closing thoughts, guys, before we end here?

Trevor Jennewine: I think it'd be interesting to do a whole show on the autonomous agriculture stuff. I think that's worth doing.

Toby Bordelon: Yeah. I think so. I don't know, Jamie, you've spent some time looking at John Deere. Right?

Jamie Louko: Not days and nights and sleepless nights, but yes. Out of all autonomous vehicle stocks, John Deere is definitely my favorite.

Toby Bordelon: It's overlooked. People don't think about it.

Jamie Louko: It's so overlooked.

Toby Bordelon: If you think about what's an autonomous company, I'm not sure John Deere comes to mind. Go ahead.

Jamie Louko: In terms of AI and machine learning they use so much more other than just their tractor, they have so much more other technology to optimize field production usage. Land, everything. They have so much more AI capabilities than just this and I think it's really, really underrated and overlooked completely.

Toby Bordelon: Yeah. I think it's worth looking at the whole space. I like that we can do this and we can find companies that are unexpected in this field and bring this to people. Final comments, Jose? Do anything left to add?

Jose Najarro: Yes, I just wanted to say, in the autonomous market. When we hear that word, I think everybody just things automatically of autonomous driving. But there's so many more autonomous market I feel is already doing really well. Like a ton automation in like factories and stuff like that with automatic robots. I think there are definitely a few companies that hit that kind of market that are doing pretty well. I just want to remind that there is a whole different world in autonomous outside of just driving.