America’s largest private landowner is betting artificial intelligence can deliver autonomous skidders, a database tracking every tree in the forest and in-cabin screens telling loggers which stems to cut and which to leave standing — a digital pivot for an industry that, until recently, still leaned on oxen and axes. That is according to Devin Stockfish, President and CEO of Weyerhaeuser, who set out the AI strategy in an interview with The Wall Street Journal this week.
In the interview, Stockfish said the timber giant will run 125 years of forest-growth records through its new digital model to sharpen harvest scheduling, replanting and yield forecasts across more than 10.4 million acres of timberland, with the company chasing a $1.5 billion incremental adjusted EBITDA target by 2030 that would roughly double 2025 profits without any rise in lumber prices.
“We remain constructive on the longer-term fundamentals that support our businesses,” Stockfish told Weyerhaeuser’s fourth-quarter 2025 earnings call in January, three months before the WSJ piece set out the AI strategy in detail.
The pitch comes with Weyerhaeuser shares trading about 40 per cent below their 2022 pandemic-era peak, even as investor enthusiasm for AI has lifted the broader market and left timber stocks behind.
From Alexa to the Forest
To run the rollout, Weyerhaeuser has hired John Scumniotales, a former Amazon Alexa executive whose old platform reaches hundreds of millions of Echo, Fire and third-party devices worldwide. The new digital model will identify tree size, species and spacing across forests, the WSJ described as comparable in size to the US state of Indiana, drawing on satellite imagery, drone footage and lidar sensors.
Where seedling survival had previously demanded manual counts by foresters in steep or difficult terrain, Weyerhaeuser has trained an AI model on drone footage to deliver the same data faster and at lower cost. The company plants more than 100 million seedlings a year, roughly equivalent to 190 every minute, both in hardwood forests in New England and West Virginia, as well as in conifer plantations in the South and Pacific Northwest.
Wood Central understands that Weyerhaeuser is also testing semi-autonomous logging equipment, with a driverless skidder dragging felled trees at a Southern site using AI-assisted navigation and terrain mapping from Kodama Systems, while the operator controlled the machine from 400 miles away.
Senior Vice President of Timberlands Travis Keatley told the WSJ the same operator could one day manage multiple skidders, with future systems expected to cut, stack and delimb trees as the company moves towards full autonomy.
Beyond the South, Weyerhaeuser is working with Sweden’s Nordic Forestry Automation on an in-cabin AI assistant that shows harvesters which trees to cut during thinning, with the algorithm trained to flag the strongest stems and leave them with space to grow into higher-value lumber and utility poles.
Weyerhaeuser is also applying AI across mill equipment, production scheduling, and truck routing, with about 5,000 trucks moving daily along company logging roads whose total mileage rivals that of the US Interstate Highway System.
The investor pitch follows a four-year housing downturn that has weighed on Weyerhaeuser’s wood products earnings, with the company’s fourth-quarter 2025 adjusted EBITDA falling 52 per cent year over year. Stockfish told the WSJ that 125 years of forest-growth data, run through the new digital model of 11 million acres, can roughly double 2025 profits by 2030 without any rise in lumber prices.
