David Lobell

Cofounder, Atlas AI

Search every verified David Lobell interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. David Lobell, a professor at Stanford University and cofounder of Atlas AI, has continued to discuss his work applying satellite data and artificial intelligence to agricultural and food security challenges. In a December 2025 podcast appearance, he recounted how Atlas AI was founded after colleagues Marshall Burke and Stefano Ermon approached him about using remote sensing to map poverty, noting that the resulting publications drew significant interest from organizations like the World Bank and national governments. He also discussed the challenges of spinning off a company from academia, saying that such an effort requires being "all in" and that he and his cofounders underestimated the complexity of building an organization. In other recent appearances, Lobell has addressed the effectiveness of various agricultural practices. In a May 2025 interview, he said that reduced tillage in the US has had positive effects on both emissions and drought resilience, while cover cropping has shown trade-offs, with negative impacts on productivity in many cases. In a February 2024 faculty forum talk, he discussed the role of agriculture in climate change and environmental degradation, and described research using satellite imagery to evaluate practices such as tillage, crop rotation, and cover cropping at scale. He has also expressed skepticism about some climate-smart agriculture claims, stating in a 2020 workshop that there is "inevitably a lot of overselling of certain solutions" and that the potential for soil carbon sequestration from practices like no-till is often overstated.