SAO JOAO DA BOA VISTA, Brazil: A towering machine rumbles through the fields of Julio Rinco’s farm in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo, engulfing whole coffee trees and shaking free beans that are collected by conveyor belts in its depths.
This automatic harvester is one of several innovations that have cut Rinco’s production costs to a level that few who use traditional, labor-intensive methods can match.
With increasing use of mechanization and other new technologies, the world’s top two coffee producers, Brazil and Vietnam, are achieving productivity growth that outstrips rivals in places such as Colombia, Central America and Africa.
They are set to tighten their grip.
A plunge in global coffee prices in recent months, to their lowest levels in 13 years, has begun to trigger a massive shake-out in the market in which only the most efficient producers will thrive, according to coffee traders and analysts.
Rival producers elsewhere in the world are increasingly likely to be driven to the margins, unable to make money from a crop they have grown for generations. Some are already turning to alternative crops while others are abandoning their farms completely.
Such shifts are almost irreversible for perennial crops like coffee, as the decision to abandon or cut down trees can hit production for several years.
“Brazil and Vietnam have had consistent increases in productivity, other countries have not,” said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, citing advances in mechanization, selective crop breeding techniques and irrigation technology.
In Colombia and Central America, coffee is typically grown on hillsides where mechanization is more difficult, and hand-picking cherries has kept production costs relatively high. The African sector, meanwhile, is dominated by small-scale farmers often unable to raise the capital needed for new techniques.
Rinco bought his harvesting machine for around 600,000 reais ($155,600) and is paying the agricultural supplies company with coffee, delivering 400 bags a year over four years. This kind of bartering is common in Brazilian farming.
One such machine in Brazil replaces dozens of people in the field. Even with financing and fuel bills, farmers and machine manufacturers say there is a reduction of 40% to 60% on harvesting costs.
“Beyond the lower costs, it made my life less complicated,” said Rinco, relieved at no longer having the gruelling task of hiring suitable pickers every year for the harvest at his farm in the Sao Joao da Boa Vista area.
“People don’t want to pick coffee anymore, they go to town to find something else to do.”
Brazil and Vietnam now produce more than half the world’s coffee, up from less than a third 20 years ago, and the proportion is rising, US Department of Agriculture estimates show.
Leading producer Brazil alone accounts for over a third of global supply. In a clear sign of increased efficiency, it reported a record crop of 62 million bags last year and is expected to produce another record in 2020, the next on-year in the country’s biennial production cycle — despite the fact the coffee-planting area has been falling for the last six years.
Vietnam is also regularly setting production records while, by contrast, in Colombia the largest ever crop was harvested in the early 1990s and in Guatemala nearly two decades ago, USDA data shows.
In countries such as Guatemala and Honduras, growers who are increasingly abandoning farms are swelling the ranks of migrants trying to enter the United States.
Average yields in Brazil have risen sharply over the last decade with figures from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization showing an increase of more than 40% to about 1.5 tons per hectare. Vietnam has also seen yields rise from already strong levels, climbing about 18% to around 2.5 tons.
Colombia did show some growth, about 12%, but remains well behind at about 1 ton per hectare while in Central America there was a decline of around 3% to a meagre 0.6 tons.
Businessman Alexandre Gobbi and two partners decided to enter coffee farming in Brazil four years ago. They bought an area in Sao Sebastião do Paraíso, in the main producing belt in Minas Gerais state, and sought out state-of-the-art tech.
Today, his farm has equipment including an underground dripping irrigation system with artificial intelligence, considered the world’s most advanced.
“It does almost everything by itself. Reads humidity levels, tells me when to add water and fertilizer and by how much,” he told Reuters, pointing to the digital panels in his control room.
With the system, plus other equipment including harvesters, he has doubled average yields to around 60 bags per hectare, and can make a profit even with current low prices.
Arabica coffee futures on ICE Futures US, the most widely used global benchmark for coffee prices, fell in May to 87.60 cents per lb, the weakest level since September 2005.
Prices have since recovered slightly but remain at a level where few producers outside Brazil and Vietnam can make money.
Arabica beans, which provide a smoother and sweeter taste, constitute nearly two-thirds of the world’s coffee. More bitter and stronger robusta beans largely make up the rest of global supply, much of them hailing from Vietnam.
A warehouse owned by Vietnamese coffee exporter Simexco Dak Lak Ltd. in the town of Di An, near Ho Chi Minh City, illustrates the scale of Vietnam’s coffee operation.
Coffee is stacked in neat piles several meters high, awaiting export to Europe. The warehouse has enough capacity to store 20,000 tons during the harvest season.
“At the height of the harvest, having enough space to create an aisle to walk through the warehouse becomes a luxury,” said Thai Anh Tuan, who manages one of three warehouses for Simexco, which exports over 80,000 tons of robusta a year.
“Every tiny bit of space will be taken up by these little beans,” Tuan added. “We have to hire additional warehouses nearby for extra storage.”
Tuan also credited the steady increase of Vietnamese coffee exports over the last four to five years to an increase in innovative farming techniques, including intercropping — growing different crops together — and the use of better technology in irrigation and cultivation.
Coffee is still the key cash crop for Dak Lak, Vietnam’s largest coffee-producing province, although durians, jack fruit, mangoes and avocado trees have all been intercropped with coffee trees to maximize income in recent years, farmers told Reuters.
Ksor Tung, a coffee grower with a 10-hectare farm, said intercropping coffee with durian trees resulted in better protection from direct sunlight and pests.
“Farmers here have experimented with intercropping for nearly a decade,” Tung told Reuters.
“Peppers used to be the most popular tree when it comes to intercropping but for the past three years, with the prices falling, almost all farmers have turned to fruit trees instead,” said Tung, adding that farmers who intercrop can triple their income per hectare.
Farmers in Colombia face a far different future.
Battered by low prices and high costs, some are contemplating switching to other crops or selling up, despite tens of millions of dollars in government aid.
Jose Eliecer Sierra, 53, has farmed coffee for three decades but low prices have forced him to look at alternatives — Hass avocados and cattle among them.
“Avocados are in high demand abroad and it’s one of the options,” he said, standing amid some of his 41,000 coffee trees on a mist-shrouded mountainside near Pueblorrico, in Antioquia province.
“Another very tempting option that people are thinking about is cattle — knocking down coffee trees and planting grass for cows,” said Sierra.
It is not the first time Colombian coffee growers have looked to other crops for a better living. Many in the south — sometimes under pressure from armed groups — abandoned it for the more lucrative coca, the raw ingredient in cocaine, though coffee has since rebounded.
For some growers, even switching crops may not save them.
Uriel Posada, who worked for more than 30 years as a house painter in the United States, dreamed of coming home to Colombia to grow coffee. Now his land is up for sale.
“I’m up to my neck in debt,” the 52-year-old said, gazing up the steep hill where his 30,000 coffee trees are planted.
“Brazil has a huge advantage over us — the land is flat and they have machinery,” Posada said. “Here I have to pay a human being to go tree by tree, branch by branch and pick the red berries.”
Avocados and cattle are good alternatives, Posada said, but require start-up funds and transition time that many local growers do not have.
“I’ll sell, pay what I owe and go. End my Colombian dream.”
How Brazil and Vietnam are tightening their grip on the world’s coffee
How Brazil and Vietnam are tightening their grip on the world’s coffee
- A plunge in global coffee prices in recent months, to their lowest levels in 13 years, has begun to trigger a massive shake-out in the market in which only the most efficient producers will thrive
Saudi Arabia’s AI imperative: seizing the agentic enterprise to fulfill Vision 2030 goals
- Workers who use AI daily are 64% more productive and 81% more satisfied with their jobs
RIYADH: As Saudi Arabia advances its ambitious Vision 2030, a transformative shift in the global workplace underscores a critical opportunity for the Kingdom’s organizations.
Slack’s latest Workforce Index survey revealed an unprecedented surge in the adoption and impact of artificial intelligence, presenting a clear pathway for Saudi businesses to lead in the era of digital labor, drive economic diversification, and create high-value roles for the future workforce.
“Saudi Arabia has all the ingredients to lead this shift: a young population, a government willing to modernize at extraordinary speed and industries preparing for global competition,” Mohammad Al-Khotani, the senior vice president and general manager of Salesforce Middle East told Arab News.
From adoption to advantage
The evidence that AI is a decisive competitive advantage is now overwhelming. Slack’s research, which surveyed 5,000 global desk workers, found that daily AI usage has soared by 233 percent in just six months.
Workers who use AI daily are 64 percent more productive and 81 percent more satisfied with their jobs than their non-AI-using colleagues. This trend is even more pronounced in specific markets; in the UK, daily AI users report an 82 percent increase in productivity and a 106 percent boost in job satisfaction.
According to the report, this surge is fundamentally reshaping work. The data confirms that trust grows with use: workers who use AI agents daily are twice as likely to trust them in areas like data protection and accuracy.
Furthermore, AI is enabling workers to expand their capabilities strategically. Some 96 percent of AI users have leveraged the technology to perform tasks they previously lacked the skills to do.
Workers are now 154 percent more likely to use AI agents to perform tasks better and more creatively, not merely to automate them. The top productivity boosts come from eliminating extensive research, assisting with communication, and overcoming creative blocks.
Given this, Al-Khotani emphasized the macroeconomic imperative for Saudi organizations to lead, not follow.
“Saudi Arabia is one of the few countries where the public sector has already set a global benchmark for digital service delivery. This creates a macroeconomic condition in which private-sector organizations must now match the pace set by the state,” he said.
He further noted that “the scale of Saudi Arabia’s transformation, megaprojects, tourism growth, manufacturing build-out and new digital sectors, requires the productivity lift that only digital labor and AI agents can provide. Organizations that adopt early will move faster, earn citizen trust and gain market share.”
This perspective is echoed by Mohamad El-Charif, founder of the Middle East’s first sovereign regulatory compliance platform, Qadi.
“When we talk about digital labor in Saudi Arabia, we have to acknowledge that legal and regulatory AI is not optional. If we wait and come in as fast followers, we’ll end up running our core legal and regulatory workloads elsewhere, governed, and updated elsewhere,” he explained to Arab News.
He argued that early adoption creates a lasting advantage: “Moving early with governed, sovereign agents, lets Saudi organizations encode their own local laws, internal policies, escalation paths and audit trails into the infrastructure.”
He added: “Under Vision 2030, leading Saudi banks, insurers, telcos, and energy companies are not just serving the domestic market; they’re becoming global players. If they build their regulatory backbone early and on their own terms, they don’t just stay in bounds at home, but they also carry that infrastructure with them as they expand.”
From automation to the agentic enterprise
This ground-level adoption aligns with a strategic corporate pivot identified in the 2025 MuleSoft Connectivity Benchmark Report, produced in collaboration with Deloitte.
The report highlighted that generative AI has reshaped human-AI interaction, and the next frontier is the rise of the “agentic enterprise.” This model involves autonomous AI agents that can operate with unprecedented independence, responding to queries, managing sophisticated tasks, and optimizing workflows without continuous human intervention.
The report found that 93 percent of IT leaders intend to introduce such autonomous agents within two years, with 40 percent having already done so and another 41 percent planning deployment within the next year.
This shift is accelerating rapidly; the average number of AI models in use has already doubled from 2024 projections, and IT leaders predict a further 78 percent increase over the next three years.
Salesforce Middle East’s Al-Khotani elaborated on this strategic potential, stating: “AI agents offer a multiplier effect across sectors that Vision 2030 prioritizes. This same efficiency can shift the economics of different industries.”
He added: “Legacy sectors can automate routine compliance, scheduling, documentation, onboarding and case resolution. Public services can move from reactive to proactive, anticipating citizen needs and completing tasks autonomously.”
Qadi’s El-Charif described this as turning “compliance from a blockage into an API,” accelerating Vision 2030’s ambitions.
“For a thriving economy, the biggest gift you can give businesses is predictable, low-friction compliance,” he said, adding: “When you encode local laws, regulations and internal policies into agents, those checks move inside the workflow. Approvals can happen in days, not months, without lowering standards.”
However, this potential is gated by integration. Some 95 percent of IT leaders cite integration challenges as the primary hurdle to effective AI implementation.
Organizations use an average of 897 applications, with 46 percent using over 1,000, yet integration levels have stagnated.
Opportunity for the Kingdom
For Saudi organizations, moving early to adopt and integrate AI is no longer optional, but a strategic necessity to lead in digital labor and deliver on Vision 2030’s goals of a vibrant society, a thriving economy, and an ambitious nation.
First, deploying AI in ways that deliver positive outcomes for both business and employees is key. The Slack Index showed that AI enhances human connection, not replaces it.
Daily AI users are 246 percent more likely to feel more connected to colleagues and report a 62 percent higher sense of belonging. This counters fears of displacement, showing AI can augment teamwork and culture.
Al-Khotani stressed the principles for positive deployment, noting: “AI must be introduced as augmentation, not substitution. When people understand that agents are handling low-value tasks, while humans focus on creativity, judgment and customer relationships, acceptance is extremely high.”
He added that Salesforce data shows 84 percent of AI users say the technology makes them enjoy their job more, largely because it reduces repetitive work.
El-Charif advocated for a practical Outcome-Workflow-Governance framework to achieve this symbiosis, saying: “We design agents to take over that ‘read, retrieve, reconcile’ loop.
“This doesn’t replace humans, but it elevates them out of the infrastructural gridlock.”
He added: “That, for me, brings a real opportunity of using agentic AI to remove the glue work that exhausts people, and free up talent to focus on strategy, relationships and judgment, which is exactly what Vision 2030 is asking our institutions to excel at.”
Agentic AI can directly accelerate Vision 2030 ambitions. As noted by Goldman Sachs Research, generative AI can streamline business workflows, automate routine tasks and give rise to a new generation of business applications.
For Saudi Arabia, this means modernizing legacy sectors, improving efficiency in health care and financial services, and supercharging nascent industries.
The MuleSoft report confirmed that APIs and API-related implementations now account for 40 percent of company revenue on average, up from 25 percent in 2018, demonstrating the tangible economic value of a connected, AI-ready infrastructure.
El-Charif also highlighted the societal dimension, stating: “For a vibrant society, this technology drives transparency and trust. When rules are encoded into agents, their application becomes consistent and audit-ready. This builds confidence in the market and investors know that compliance isn’t subjective, but structural.”
Finally, this transition will create high-value roles for humans. The integration challenge itself is a source of future jobs. The MuleSoft report found that developers spend an estimated 39 percent of their time building custom integrations, and IT staffing budgets are expected to rise by 61.5 percent year-over-year to meet AI demand.
Al-Khotani foresees specific new roles emerging from the AI integration challenge, saying: “Salesforce’s research shows that organizations adopting AI expect their data and integration teams to grow nearly 50 percent over the next three years.”
He went on explaining that this opens pathways for new roles such as AI integration architects, agent workflow designers, and responsible AI officers and digital trust specialists.
El-Charif identified the emergence of roles such as “Legal Engineer,” — someone who understands both the regulation and how to encode it into logic.
Furthermore, as AI handles routine tasks, workers are freed for more strategic, creative, and innovative work, precisely the skills needed for a knowledge-based economy.
Al-Khotani envisioned this shift elevating Saudi Arabia’s broader economic structure: “As agents take on routine and administrative tasks, Saudi Arabia’s workforce will shift toward higher-value roles that emphasize creativity, human judgment, and strategic decision-making.”
He added that this shift increases productivity per capita, a core Vision 2030 outcome, because the workforce is no longer limited by the volume of manual work it can process. “The macroeconomic structure becomes more innovation-driven and less labor-intensive.”
Global AI adoption is accelerating, worker productivity and satisfaction are skyrocketing with its use, and the next wave of enterprise value lies in agentic AI.
For Saudi Arabia, the mandate is to build the robust, integrated digital foundations today that will allow its organizations and workforce to not just participate in this future, but to lead it, turning the promise of Vision 2030 into an intelligent, automated, and human-centric reality.
As Al-Khotani concluded: “The future economy will not reward automation alone, it will reward nations that use AI to elevate human potential. Saudi Arabia is positioned to be one of them.”
