Customer Stories
AGCO wanted employees to use AI safely, not experiment with disconnected tools outside enterprise governance.
With Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft 365 Copilot, AGCO enabled employees to become makers and build agents and paired citizen development with expert support.
With more than 900 employees volunteering to build agents, AGCO is turning AI adoption into operational speed—cutting some quality reviews from weeks to about an hour.
AGCO Corporation builds agricultural machinery and precision agriculture technology for farmers around the world. Through brands including Fendt, Massey Ferguson, Valtra, and PTx, the company serves customers in 140 countries. Its equipment ranges from tractors and combines intelligent systems that upgrade machines already working in the field.
The company's AI strategy is rooted in a practical idea: put trusted tools in employees' hands early, and help them build responsibly. Aryn Drawdy, Director of Strategic Partnerships at AGCO, described the goal: "For citizen development with AI, we wanted to find the fastest path to market. We wanted to make sure that our employees were comfortable with it." AGCO chose Microsoft Copilot Studio for agent creation and Microsoft 365 Copilot for everyday productivity because employees already worked across Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft OneDrive, and Microsoft SharePoint.
As Todd Bailey, Vice President & CDAIO at AGCO, says, “This is not about experimenting with AI for its own sake—it’s about applying it where it matters most. Together with Microsoft, we’re building an AI foundation that helps AGCO move faster, reduce friction, and equip our teams to make better decisions for the farmers and customers we serve.”
“This is not about experimenting with AI for its own sake—it’s about applying it where it matters most. Together with Microsoft, we’re building an AI foundation that helps AGCO move faster, reduce friction, and equip our teams to make better decisions for the farmers and customers we serve.”
Todd Bailey, Vice President & CDAIO, AGCO Corp
900 makers volunteered
AGCO was not trying to create a wave of disconnected automation. Leaders saw employees learning about AI, experimenting on personal devices, and looking for faster ways to solve local problems. The risk was not curiosity; it was letting that curiosity become unmanaged shadow IT. Drawdy said, "I think asking how AI can help you is a mistake. I think asking where do you see gaps today, where are your friction points, that's where we have to start."
This focus on real friction points was especially important in manufacturing workflows. As Drawdy explains, “Product improvements are often implemented as running changes within active production builds, which require coordination across multiple teams.” These handoffs don’t follow a linear process, and much of the communication happens outside structured workflows.
As a result, quality and warranty processes can stretch over weeks, and sometimes months, as teams reviewed issues, validated data, and aligned on next steps. Much of that effort depended on a small group of experts who interpreted data and guided decisions across teams.
By introducing agents into these workflows, AGCO aims to simplify how information moves between systems and people. Instead of relying on manual coordination, agents bring the right context into the process, connect data across design and supply chain systems, and move issues forward more quickly. The goal is not to replace expertise, but to make it easier to apply that expertise where it’s needed—reducing delays, improving visibility, and helping teams resolve issues faster.
AGCO began by treating AI literacy as the foundation for enterprise transformation. At a leadership meeting with about 2,200 people, the company asked who wanted to start building agents. About 900 employees immediately raised their hands and volunteered to become makers. AGCO provided them with access, began training the next day, and used Microsoft Teams to support a growing maker community where employees could ask questions and help one another.
The rollout paired enthusiasm with governance. Drawdy explained, "It’s not shadow IT—it’s support. We work alongside teams to ensure they’re using Microsoft tools the right way and partnering effectively so they can close gaps, move faster, and show ROI through new ways of working." In practice, employees surface friction points while AGCO's AI leaders and Microsoft specialists help shape the right solutions.
The agent portfolio is broad, and AGCO is designing it as an agentic framework rather than a one-off solution. Aryn Drawdy said the work with Microsoft focuses on enabling a model that supports multiple connected agents over time. This approach is already taking shape across the business: AGCO has hundreds of citizen-built agents and shared team agents, while larger enterprise solutions are being co-created with Microsoft. The quality framework is expected to include a series of agents rather than a single bot. A supplier agent reads contracts and identifies where AI suppliers could increase value and potential savings over the next year or two. An agronomy agent combines AGCO agronomy studies with sales guidance and web content to help sales teams connect agricultural issues to relevant machines.
These examples show how AGCO evolves from everyday productivity to business-specific agents. The company is not asking supply chain, quality, or agronomy experts to become AI experts overnight. Instead, teams bring the pain point, and AI champions shape the automation, agent, or workflow that removes friction. As Drawdy put it, “We’re really working with the Microsoft team to enable this agentic framework. It’s not just one agent—it’s going to be several when we’re done with it.”
“We’re really working with the Microsoft team to enable this agentic framework. It’s not just one agent—it’s going to be several when we’re done with it.”
Aryn Drawdy, Director of Strategic Partnerships, AGCO Corp
For employees, the most visible change is momentum. People are not waiting for a central team to define every use case; they are requesting licenses, sharing ideas, and helping each other learn. As Drawdy said, “Every day somebody comes to me and says, ‘How do I get a Copilot Studio license? What do I need to do?’” The maker community continues to expand and drive rapid adoption throughout the organization, growing from the original 900-plus makers to roughly 2,000 across AGCO.
That momentum is translating into production use. AGCO now has several hundred enterprise agents in production, with several hundred more moving through cohorts designed to consolidate and optimize them for enterprise use. This shows that the program is creating a path from employee experimentation to governed, business-ready deployment.
The enterprise quality framework highlights a clear opportunity to enhance manufacturing decision-making, where reliance on small expert teams can slow progress. AGCO is using AI agents to rapidly interpret, validate, and advance quality issues through the process. As Drawdy put it, "We’re moving from a time-consuming process of review, analysis, and alignment to a vastly improved state—where issues are read, validated, and quickly advanced to the next step." This shift will accelerate resolution cycles, reduce dependency on constrained expertise, and enable faster, more responsive support for manufacturing teams and farmers.
AGCO's supplier and agronomy examples also suggest new ways to translate knowledge into action. Contract reviews can surface AI and cost-saving opportunities, while agronomy knowledge can become more accessible to sales teams. The common thread is not simply productivity—it is preserving expertise and making it available at the moment someone needs to make a decision.
Next, AGCO is focusing on supply chain, product management, and customer acquisition domains . This phase is also about scaling safely, helping more employees understand how AI fits into their daily work, how to use it responsibly, and how to identify the right business problems for agents. Drawdy said, "We're looking at how we can safely accelerate? We're looking at what literacy means to the organization? How are we upskilling at the same time?"
That literacy push is tied to AGCO’s next phase of AI work and its broader relationship with Microsoft. With supply chain, product management, and customer acquisition identified as priority focus areas for the remainder of 2026, AGCO is looking to scale agents in ways that addresses the end to end roadmap enabling agents to stay connected, governed, and close to real business needs. “Our partnership with Microsoft continues to evolve,” Drawdy said. “We need these partnerships in place to move faster.” For AGCO, the opportunity is not to build a million unconnected agents. It is to create a loop between employees who understand the work, AI teams who understand governance, and partners who bring technical depth.
The long-term vision is to help employees move quickly with the business. As Drawdy said, "We want all our employees to move quickly with us. We want them to understand how important this is to our business, to our farmers, and to the equipment we manufacture every day—that AI is part of everything we do. We all have to be on this journey together."
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