Donald Trump will not be able to force Greenland to change ownership, a former top adviser to the US president has told the BBC.

IBM’s vice chairman Gary Cohn, who advised Trump on the economy in his first term, said “Greenland will stay Greenland” and linked the need for access to critical minerals to his former boss’s plans for the territory.

Cohn is one of America’s top tech bosses, a leader in the race to develop AI and quantum computing, and served under Trump as director of the White House National Economic Council.

In a sign of how seriously business leaders are taking the crisis, he warned “invading an independent country that is part of Nato” would be “over the edge”.

He also suggested the president’s recent comments about Greenland “may be part of a negotiation”.

“I just came from a US congressional delegation meeting, and I think there’s pretty uniform consensus with both Republicans and Democrats that Greenland will stay Greenland”, he said.

Greenland would be happy for the US to increase its military presence on the island, he said, with the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean “becoming much more of a military threat”.

The US could also negotiate an “offtake” agreement for Greenland’s vast yet largely untapped supplies of rare earth minerals, Cohn suggested.

“But I think, you know, invading a country that doesn’t want to be invaded – that’s part of a militaristic alliance, Nato – seems to me to be a little bit over the edge at this point”, he said.

Cohn indicated the president may be overstating his demands as part of a negotiating tactic – something he says the president has done successfully in the past.

“You’ve got to give Donald Trump some credit for the successes he’s had and he’s many times tried to overreach to get something in a compromise situation,” he said.

“He has overreached in advertising something to end up getting what he actually wants. Maybe what he actually wants is a larger military presence and an offtake.”

The start of this year’s World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort of Davos has been overshadowed by the president’s increasingly aggressive stance on the arctic territory, with many political and business leaders alarmed about the potential geopolitical and economic impact. Trump is due to address delegates at the gathering on Wednesday.

While Cohn expressed reservations about some of the president’s actions, he said the US administration had “various different motives” for what they were doing.

He said Trump’s decision to intervene in Venezuela was “a path” to disrupt the country’s relationship with China, the biggest market for its oil, as well as Russia and Cuba.

Cohn also thinks that the president has become increasingly focused on the importance of rare earth minerals, noting that “Greenland has quite a supply” of the resources.

Those minerals are critical to the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and quantum computing – also a major talking point in Davos.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday hit back at claims Trump has blamed his escalating threats over Greenland on the fact he was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In a message to Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Trump blamed the country for not giving him the prize and said he no longer feels obliged to think only of peace.

Bessent said: “I don’t know anything about the president’s letter to Norway, and I think it’s complete canard that the President will be doing this because of the Nobel Prize.

“The president is looking at Greenland as a strategic asset for the United States. We are not going to outsource our hemispheric security to anyone else.”

Developments in quantum computing and AI are seen as critical not just for the US economy and productivity, but for US strategic influence in the world.

“IBM is dead centre in what’s going on in quantum today. We have the largest amount of quantum computers in use today” Cohn said, highlighting that his company has put many of these computers into use across America in firms from the banking industry to medicine.

“AI is going to be the backbone for data that feeds into quantum to solve problems we’ve never been able to solve”, he added.

“Where we’re heading is AI is going to be part of everyone’s enterprise. AI and quantum are going to be working in the enterprise behind the scenes to make every company more efficient. And we’re just at the beginning of that sort of long road, and that’s going to take probably another three to five years to get there.”

Earlier this month, Google, also a US company, told the BBC it had the world’s best-performing quantum computer. The race to develop the technology is the other key talking point – apart from Greenland – at the World Economic Forum.

Jake Leguee is a third-generation farmer in Saskatchewan, Canada.

Since his grandfather bought the 17,000 acres in 1956, the Leguee family has grown canola, wheat, flax and green lentils.

As a child, he watched his father and grandfather spending hours riding their tractor to sow seeds and spray crops. Sweat would coat their shirts after those long, hot days.

“It was a lot less efficient back then,” says Leguee. “Today, technology has vastly improved the job that we do.”

To keep his farm competitive, Leguee has made several innovations, particularly when it comes to crop spraying.

With software and remote cameras attached to his John Deere tractor, he can kill the weeds much more efficiently, a practice every farmer has to do before planting seeds.

“It can look down and spray a nozzle when the sensors pick a weed, while we’re going around 15 miles an hour,” Leguee says.

He adds that he saves on pesticide spray since the nozzles only turn on when weeds are detected, as opposed to the kind of blanket spraying he used to do.

The return-on-investment for adding these new layers to his farm operations are often high, Leguee adds.

“There are low-cost solutions that won’t be as expensive as new spraying tech, and they could be an app to help you better keep your records, for example,” he says.

It’s a lesson that farmers across North America are taking on board.

A 2024 McKinsey survey found that 57% of North American farmers are likely to try new yield-increasing technologies in the next two years.

Another report, from 2022, by the US Department of Agriculture said that while the number of farms in the country is shrinking, the farms that remain are becoming “tech dense”.

Norah Lake, the owner and farmer at Vermont’s Sweetland Farms, says to get a successful harvest, “there’s a lot of looking forward and then backwards and then forwards and then backwards in crop farming”.

She once used Microsoft Excel to plug in the figures for, say, their yields from a recent harvest, or a given year, and see how they compare to years prior.

“I’d want to know that if we planted 100 bed feet of broccoli, what did we actually produce?” she says.

More recently, Lake, who grows vegetables such as asparagus, tomatoes and zucchini, as well as pastured meat, has been using software and an app from a company called Tend.

She wanted to digitise and streamline those laborious tasks into a piece of tech that she can view on her cellphone or computer.

Now she can input those harvest numbers into Tend, and the software can give her details, and advice, on how to manage her crop best for the coming harvest.

“We can use Tend to calculate the quantity of seed that we need to order based on the row feet of a particular crop that we want to harvest,” she says.

There’s no shortage of tech for farmers to choose from.

Sygenta, the argri-tech giant based in Switzerland, offers farmers the software Cropwise, which uses AI and satellite imagery to guide farmers on what to do next with their crops, or alerts them to emergencies.

“It can tell the farmer that you need to visit the southeast corner of your field because something is not right about that section, such as a pest outbreak,” says Feroz Sheikh, chief information office of Syngenta Group. “And the system also has 20 years of our weather pattern data fed into a machine learning model, so we know exactly what kind of conditions lead to what outcome.”

With that data, farmers can cover their crops before, say, an incoming snap frost that could kill a large portion of their acreage.

In Germany, Jean-Pascal Lutze founded NoMaze to give farmers a deeper understanding of how different crops will perform under climate conditions.

Its software is rolling out this year. “We did field tests in a variety of environments and then created simulations through our computer model to give clients better insight into, say, how much water to use, how to get the maximum yield,” he explains.

The impact of these technologies might be felt by the consumer, says Heather Darby, an agronomist and soil specialist at the University of Vermont.

Bringing more food to market could translate to lower prices at the register, she says.

“When farmers get help to avoid crop failures, that could lead to a more controlled farm environment and a reliable and secure food system,” says Darby.

Back in Saskatchewan, Darby notes younger farmers are turning to technology while older tillers might resist major change.

He says that farmers need to be open to change.

“After all, when you think about it, some of these farms are multi-million-dollar businesses that are supporting multiple families. We need to embrace technology that works for us.”

“I heard someone say once: ‘If you treat farming as a business, it’s a great way of life, but if you treat your farming as a way of life, it’s a horrible business.'”