CES has announced that John Deere Chairman and CEO, John May, will take the keynote stage this during CES 2023 in Las Vegas. May became the company’s Chief Executive Officer in November 2019 and assumed the position of Chairman in May 2020. He was named President & Chief Operating Officer earlier in 2019. Previously, May was President, Worldwide Agriculture & Turf Division, with responsibility for the Americas and Australia, as well as for the global harvesting, turf and utility, crop care, and intelligent solutions businesses. He also served as Chief Information Officer and as President, Agricultural Solutions. In these roles, he spearheaded initiatives to develop the Deere family of “smart” machines, systems, and solutions to unlock customer economic value through enhanced precision, automation, speed, and efficiency turning the narrative of John Deere from an historic farming company to a technology company. May joined John Deere in 1997 after working as a management consultant at KPMG.
The iconic American manufacturer of agricultural machinery will use the CES stage to share how purpose-driven sustainability and advancements in technology, are addressing one of the world’s greatest challenges — feeding a growing global population.
Following its debut at CES 2019 as the first company to bring a giant piece of high-tech farm equipment to the world’s largest technology show (an AI-deploying corn harvester and self-driving tractor), John Deere returned to the show in 2020 with a completely different machine and narrative, this time focusing on AI-enabled spraying and sustainability with its R4038 sprayer that can target the spraying of individual weeds versus spraying a whole feild.
By exhibiting at CES, John Deere raised awareness to challenges faced by farmers around the world and how these challenges can be addressed by technology.
Deere’s CES 2020 presence elicited an unprecedented social media response from the agriculture community, most prominently from farmers themselves who were inspired by the company’s at first rather odd presence at an influential tech event. John Deere social media channels ended up garnering over 25 million impressions, including over 2 million Deere CES video views with nearly 2 million Instagram story views.
John Deere also earned significant and extensive coverage with the world’s leading technology and business media, allowing them to further their story’s reach to key audiences from within and well beyond the technology and agriculture communities.
The technology story for John Deere is preparing for a population that will grow by another 2 billion people on the planet in the next 20 years, meaning there will be more people to feed but less land to do it on, which can only be solved with advanced technology and innovation which are the pillars of all consumer technology trade shows.