How Rare Scaled an AI Agent From 200 to 16,000 Users | Brett Jenks, CEO, Rare

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Speaker B: What if one of your friends could be an agronomical expert who happens to be an agent? Agentierra is an agent that sits behind WhatsApp so that a local farmer can understand weather patterns, their soil composition, humidity, best practices for composting cheap fertilizer from your own land. Based on our initial pilot work with Agent Tierra, we had 100% satisfaction. The most important first phase, it's got to be about trust.

Speaker C: Brett, welcome.

Speaker B: Hey, thank you. Nice to be here.

Speaker C: A pleasure. All right, I got a big one to start. You've had four careers that don't obviously connect. For me. Chief political correspondent at 22, film producer in Boston, making Duncan and Amex commercials. Ecotourism entrepreneur in Costa rica, and now 26 years running Rare. What's the through line? What were you doing the whole time?

Speaker B: Looking to find meaning. Basically, I got out of college and I was a decent, decent writer. I could put five sentences together in a paragraph. So I worked as a journalist, um, in Hudson County, New Jersey, which was at the time maybe the most corrupt county in the United States. Remember the Marlon Brando film On the Waterfront?

Speaker C: Never seen

Speaker B: it. 50s. Anyway, super corrupt place. Every political leader that I covered eventually served federal time for some corrupt act. That's how, that's how bad it was. So I lasted about two years. Uh, then there was a recession and where nobody was hiring journalists. And so I just started cutting up, uh, you know, uh, uh, bagels and making coffee for producers on TV commercial sets. And then eventually climb your ranks. Was a producer, uh, assistant ad. You know, that type of, uh, role. Glorified bagel cutter. Uh, and then I had an epiphany and I moved. I literally woke up one morning after a big wrap party after a 16 day shoot.

Speaker C: So. Hungover.

Speaker B: Hungover. Paul. Epiphany. Start with a hangover. And I had written on the wall in my flat in Boston, get out of the film business. And I had signed it and I didn't remember writing it.

Speaker C: Wow.

Speaker B: So I like to say, you know, the writing was literally on the wall. Um, and I moved to Costa Rica and volunteered to teach at immoral school just to do something with a little more meaning. And that changed my life. I volunteered for 10 months. I ended up living in Costa Rica for four years. I worked with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Environment and started building programs for rural education, for conservation. Uh, and I have not done anything other than that ever since. I was about 25 at the time.

Speaker C: How instant was that click of like, this is what I'm supposed to do, right? You're around all these corrupt people, and then you're around film producers that want to make money and everything has to be done on time, and then you find this thing. Like, was that instant, that connection?

Speaker B: It sort of, um, it took a while, and then it happened overnight. Partly it was just falling in love with the rainforest of Central America. Costa Rica is a beautiful place. Partly it was this country that had disbanded its military. This very idyllic stroke of genius. The president in the 50s said, okay, we won the civil war. If we have enough teachers, we won't need a military. So it's a very peaceful nation, um, and a very agrarian country. So in some ways it was. It kind of felt like going back to my roots in rural Ohio. It just felt. Felt like home, even though I was speaking a different language and, you know, it was Central America. And I. I really got connected to the idea that being somewhat of some privilege, coming from the United States, having an education, having some resources and networks, I could potentially do something that would be valuable to the people, you know, who were taking care of me in my rural, you know, home in Costa Rica, so I could help people, I could help nature. And it clicked. And I, uh, someone explained to me what a conservationist was. And as soon as they explained it, I said, that's what I want to do,

Speaker C: address them.

Speaker B: But I had no idea what one was before I moved to Costa Ria.

Speaker C: From that epiphany to joining RARE to now becoming the CEO and running the company, what does it throw in there? What was the mission when you first joined? Has that changed over time? Or has the goal always been the same

Speaker B: rare forever, since its inception in the 1970s, has been focused on a pretty singular belief. And that is, if you're going to achieve conservation, if we're going to protect the landscapes, the climate, the wildlife, that not only inspire us, but that we literally depend on every day, whether we know it or not, if you're going to succeed in that endeavor, you have to not only involve people, you have to empower people. You have to engage people. People have to do it themselves in many ways. Uh, and so for more than 50 years, our mission has been inspire, change so people and nature thrive. You break that down. Inspiring change requires that you understand how people change and why they change. And so that sent us on a journey to understand human nature. If I can be so grandiose,

Speaker C: um,

Speaker B: beh, there's a lot of behavioral science out there that tells us why we're so irrational as human beings, how we make decisions, how emotions work, how, uh, decision science can help us understand how to influence the decision about how you far or how you fish. So that's been the mission, but we've, we've evolved considerably within that mission over 50 years. Where today, if you jump to the present, we're working in 60 countries around the world. Local conservation leaders who are either on our staff or in the local government or in local communities, who are our partners, are inspiring people en masse throughout these countries,

Speaker C: um,

Speaker B: to fish sustainably, to farm sustainably, to care for nature while also investing in themselves.

Speaker C: I want to talk more about what you're building with Agent Tierra. You kind of have this philosophy of listening and understanding first before building anything, right? So talk to me about that, like boots on the ground approach to building. Agent Tierra.

Speaker B: So Agent Tiara is a, is a, uh, an agent that sits behind WhatsApp, uh, so that a local farmer can understand weather patterns, their soil composition, the, uh, humidity, uh, best practices for composting cheap fertilizer from your own land. Best practices for ring fencing cattle to keep them out of the river. Best practices for, um, how you harvest and then leave the detritus as fertilizer, you know, without tilling. So no till, uh, practices. All of those practices are well proven in regenerative agriculture, but they're not commonly adopted yet. So they're good for the soil, they're good for nature, they're good for the farmer, but they're not widely used. And so we set out to solve that. First we had to build trust with an, um, original, uh, group, uh, of farmers in Colombia who were going to adopt and prove out these approaches. So we started working with about 200 farmers who we sort of handpicked because they were sort of the early adopter types. They were curious, they were interested, and they were willing to take a few risks to try some things differently. By working with the early adopters and identifying them carefully, we then, uh, were not only able to demonstrate that within a year, from 6% of local farmers using basic compacting uh, practices we could get to 94% composting step one. In a really good change of approaches, we also built a lot of trust with those local farmers. And by building trust, we were then able to start doing some additional things from composting to here's how we can address some of the blights on the cacao, or here's some better practices for tomatoes or for potatoes, uh, or for onions or, you know, the basic foodstuffs that these poor local farmers are growing. By building that trust, by understanding the farmer, uh, then we were not only able to have about 50 of those original 200 farmers put on a new T shirt and a new identity and become profes, the professors of these practices to the next several hundred farmers, but we were also able to introduce a new idea, which is, if you're already using WhatsApp to talk to, uh, friends and family, what if one of your friends could be an agronomical expert M who happens to be a virtual agricultural extensionist, an agent. And so we built agent Tierra specifically, and she's called Luce. Luz is now everybody's best friend. And they type, they write to Luce and they say, mi carida, you know, my lovely Luce, can you help me with today's problem? Based on our initial, uh, pilot work with Agent tiara, we had 100% satisfaction, which I laughingly said is the highest it's ever going to get. It's never going to stay there, but it's free. It's the only thing of its kind in town. And so of course everybody loves it. But we're off to a really good start. We have now gone from 200 farmers to 16,000 farmers just in Colombia. But recognize there are 600 million smallholder farmers all over the world and almost all of them need a similar kind of service. So the next big hurdle is scale.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker B: What's it going to be like to go big globally and with who

Speaker C: Was it the access to information? Was that the sole reason that this wasn't adopted before? Or is it the fact that you have a really easy to interact with interface, or is it the fact you've came in and worked with and talked about about the incentives that this will actually build?

Speaker B: Brilliant question. I mean, I think the bottom line is that's the question we ask every day with every program around the world. It's what's gonna make change, what's gonna bring about change? In this case, we literally sent a couple of PhD neuroscientists, believe it or not, to first do a literature review of all the behavior change strategies that have been used with smallholder farmers. So they did the lit review and the white paper and they came back and they said basically our theory is people change when they see farmers change, when they see other farmers changing. Once you have a group of initial farmers adopting a practice, being excited about it, bragging about it more importantly, and you could see the proof in the tasting of the pudding because they say where you come from, you're mhm able to then build trust that these guys are onto something. And so the combination of building proof points, building trust, and then having one group of farmers go influence another group of farmers was the beginning. Technology ideally just scales that phenomenon.

Speaker C: Mhm. The more you learn about human behavior, do you come to believe that humans are complex or more simple?

Speaker B: You know, that's the billion dollar question. Maybe it's a trillion dollar question. I think we're incredibly complex humans. You know, we, we don't understand how our bodies work, we don't understand how our brains work. The same way we increasingly don't understand how AI is working.

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Speaker B: okay, so it's incredibly complex and yet we're also very much primates.

Speaker C: Sure,

Speaker B: we're animals and most of the time we act like pretty basic primates, which means we care for our own, we're very tribal, we're willing to defend each other and we don't want to do anything that's going to get us kicked out. Because a primate alone in the wild is very vulnerable.

Speaker C: We

Speaker B: tend to do much better than packs. And you look around, that's sort of why we all dress the same. That's why we all aspire to say things. It's all, we eat the same foods, we want to fit in M because it's to our advantage. That's the simple part of being shoop that we need to figure out how to unleash in order to drive change.

Speaker C: I think you've answered one part for me, right? The society part. And you mentioned getting this initial subset of farmers on board and then people have that FOMO and they want to join in and I get that talk to me about this efficiency part, right? Like, people want to feel taken care of. They want to make sure they've got enough resources. So what is the incentive for them using and adopting these practices? Does it make them more profitable? Does it make them more money? Does it make them more secure? What is the actual incentive here?

Speaker B: I think that's actually the second step, and I think you're right. Most economists look at any of the kinds of things we work on, and they say, okay, what's the material incentive? How much more money are they going to make? I'm fond of saying that's the best second question, because for very poor people who don't have bank accounts, we're talking about these hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers who feed many of us every day, by the way. We don't know their names. We don't know they've aggregated their crops up and shipped them across the world. But they grew what we eat. They don't have bank accounts, they don't have ID cards. In many cases, they don't have any insurance. They are as vulnerable as you get. And we're asking them to try something risky to make a change to their livelihood. So the most important first phase, it's got to be about trust, and it's got to be about social dynamics, social influence. But then it's one thing to say, okay, I'm going to incrementally improve my practice. In our case, in our pilots, we've seen a 30% reduction in input costs because when you're composting, you can use less, uh, applied nutrients.

Speaker C: Um,

Speaker B: when, when you have a healthier plot, you can use less pesticides. And when you're smarter about both, you can, you, you can basically cut your cost 30% and boost your yields 30% on average. At least that's what our first demonstration plot showed. And that's good enough for the second question, because now you're saving real money and you're making more money after that. It's a question of what does the development curve look like? Because any person anywhere on earth, when, when asked, I'm going to overgeneralize grossly here, you'd say, you know, I'd be really happy if I had about twice as much as I have today. Whether you're a billionaire or a centimillionaire or you're a smallholder firm, it would be great to have twice as much. That's also part of human nature. And so the question is, how do you help people get on a path to Self realization in a sustainable way. That's the tricky part.

Speaker C: I want to know what it's like as a hands on experience. Right. So I'm on WhatsApp with agent Tierra and say, for example, I'm not in Colombia, right. But I'm in my back garden in Scotland and I want to figure out how to have these sustainable practices. And do you like, am I taking pictures? Am I doing voice notes? How is this actually working?

Speaker B: Genoa, so we're focused exclusively right now on Colombia.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker B: And then Brazil and then Honduras. So we're starting to expand first to Portuguese and then another country in Latin America. But I'm sure there's something similar within Scotland or it could be built. Basically you've got data about the plants, people you're trying to grow in Scotland. You have, uh, there are agronomists who've already published pretty much everything you need to know about regenerative ag practices in Scotland. Then the question is who's taken the database and who's made it available through an agent and then what's the interoperability? Are you on an app? Are you using another service to get to the agent? Those are all law technology questions that are not that complicated anymore, thanks in part to companies like uh, and uh, ideally it's getting. Not only ideally, GD is getting easier and faster. People are now building agents in a day, billing agents in a week. Uh, my chief of staff just took maternity leave and over the last six weeks she built an agent to do most of what she's going to do. So she has an employee when she comes back from maternity leave who's her agent. Uh, given that you should be able to improve your regenerative ag practices in your backyard in Scotland, like next week.

Speaker C: Yeah. I'm curious about the cultural differences and how that influences your approach. Right. You mentioned in Colombia just now, then going to move into Brazil. So not only a difference in a language, but a difference in the way that people live and the way that they approach society and the way that they approach family and FOMO and culture. How do you kind of navigate that when you're implementing this new structure?

Speaker B: Culture is critical. And having worked now and more than 60 countries throughout the global south, it's everything. So sort of step number one is you got to do a lot of listening. You have to hire local people and you have to help people who understand the culture and who speak the language. Take practices that have been proven elsewhere and customize them and adopt them and adapt them so that they can work in the local contest, our belief is. And locals are the experts. Now that doesn't mean they can't learn a hell of a lot from someone who's already solved a problem somewhere else. And human nature is to borrow and extract and appropriate. Our job is to facilitate that. And so it's, you know, you go to Brazil, yeah, you have a different language. You go from Spanish to Portuguese. Different relationships between communities and government, different levels of trust. Katrine extensionists and local farmers. Different levels of trust between farmers. You might have different, uh, gender equity issues. In some cases you have female farmers, and in some cases there's a lot of machismo. And that's just two countries. Uh, however you define culture and whatever variables you could list, you're going to have to address those carefully, no matter where you were.

Speaker C: I mean, the good thing about this is it's infinitely interesting, right?

Speaker B: Never a dull mover, that's for sure.

Speaker C: Zoom out a second for me. Um, when you're lying in bed at night, what keeps you up? What are you worried about?

Speaker B: So I, I run a global nonprofit. What keeps me up at night is one, uh, paying the bills, keeping the lights on, raising money, uh, two, making sure we have really inspired talented people working for us who feel like they're realizing their fantasy of having an impact on the world by working at rare. And all of the complexity that comes with human, ah, resource management and talent development. Then there's also exogenous shocks all the time. So we, I know there's something just out there on the horizon, lurking, whether it's an economic crash, whether it's the act of some dictator in a country in which we operate, whether it's uh, the US government shifting stance or policy or what tariffs might do the trade of some of these, uh, some, some of these, uh, crops or foodstuffs or fish. Then there's storm surges and hurricanes and typhoons and fires and insurrections. And if you do this work long enough, you will have seen a cycle of everything I just mentioned multiple times. And so we're pretty clear to, you know, keep abreast of what's going on and hope that we get an email after you see the news brush, that everybody's okay and country on our team and the next, that everybody's okay into communities in which we're working and that there's a path forward that's going to leave everybody more resilient. So there's a few things to worry about. Uh, lying in bed.

Speaker C: I mean, everything you mentioned there is some sort of crisis Right. What has that taught you about human behavior and how we adapt to those circumstances?

Speaker B: We tend to not like planning. We tend to not be very good at looking forward. Humans are very focused on the here and the now. Maybe the next corner, uh, you know, on Wall street, maybe the next six months if you're lucky. But resilience and strategic success requires you to be able to manage the today while looking ahead 3 years and 5 years and 10 years. It requires us, it behooves us really, as a civilization to build with hundred year timelines in mind.

Speaker C: Um,

Speaker B: you know, we build a building, and many of them we're going to tear down in 30 years because they've had their ROI. But what does that say about what we actually value? So whether you're talking about building cities or building companies or building infrastructure, humans, we would be far more successful the next hundred years as primates, as the dominant species on planet Earth, if we could just start looking a little further down the track.

Speaker C: What does your intuition tell you about people? I'm, I'm positively cynical. I think that's maybe just growing up in the uk, right? Like, everyone's pretty stoic and cynical. And I think probably the most humans are to some degree good people, but corruptible. And I'm curious what you think. You've interacted with such a swathe of different people from different backgrounds with different incentives. You think people naturally stray towards good?

Speaker B: I think I embrace my inner naivety and I believe in people. I code people. I think people are incredible creatures. Yeah, we're corruptible. We have, uh, bad apples. Generally speaking, people care about their families. Generally speaking, people care about the people around them. They care about their friends. There's always sociopaths and psychopaths. But, um, generally speaking, it's in our self interest to care, because then we're also taken care of. The question is, how do people care more about more than their tribe, more than their country, for more than their species? We're still working on cracking that code. That's a big one.

Speaker C: Let me finish off with a question that relates to that. So somehow, um, you've got a microphone and you can speak to all however many 7 billion people that we have on the planet. So one thing that you would say to them,

Speaker B: look around and look up at the night sky, or a couple billion stars in a couple billion galaxies. It's infinite. This is the only place that we know there's sapien species, the only place we know there's life. We have one job, and that's to survive. So you've adopted. And we are doing a very good job of enriching ourselves, but we are not doing a very good job of making sure we survive. And that's our job.

Speaker C: Brett, thank you so much for your time.

Speaker B: Thank you. Appreciate it. Great to know

Speaker C: you. Pleasure

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