Top 10 CPG Data & AI Use Cases Driving Innovation & Profitable Growth

The Consumer-Packaged Goods (CPG) industry has weathered the storms of inflation, spikes in interest rates, rising cost of materials and expanding regulations over the last several years by raising prices that are inevitably passed on to the consumer. In 2024 and beyond, a new, more innovative playbook for profitable growth is necessary for CPGs as price hikes will be less effective and many of the macro-economic headwinds slowing the economy down will begin to subside or normalize. To get ahead, large CPG brands must innovate across the business (sales, marketing, product development, production, & supply chain) by investing in data and AI to chart the course for innovation. As a result, CPG brands that manage, govern, master, secure and deploy data most effectively emerge from the economic morass of the last several years as profitable growers positioned to win on innovation – rather than price increases.   So, how do CPG brands execute a data and AI strategy that drives profitable growth?

Focus on Business Value

At a recent conference, Dr. Athina Knaioura, Chief Strategy & Transformation Officer at Pepsi, discussed AI Transformation, her advice was, “If there is no ROI, skip it”. This underscores the importance of anchoring data and AI projects to business value such as revenue improvements, market share expansion, bottom-line profits or tangible efficiencies. One of the biggest challenges for many companies is where to start, which use cases to focus on given finite budget and resources, and the need to show the business value of projects. Since nine out of the Consumer Goods Technology Top 10 CPG Brands rely on Informatica to confidently use data and AI to deliver on their brand promise, Informatica created the Top 10 CPG Data & Use Cases guide as a map to the most implemented use cases that drive business value across our global CPG customer base.

The 2024 Top 10 CPG Data & AI Use Cases:
 

1. Customer Intelligence: Curate a golden customer record across all customer data systems to embed in any function or process:  direct-to-consumer, marketing, category management, supply chain and service
2. Sales & Category Management: Confidently quantify sales, via 3rd party services, and market share across all categories, products, channels and geographies in a consistent and reliable manner.
3. Marketing & Brand Management: Invest in the right brand, trade and retail media opportunities to maximize marketing spend, campaign ROI, and market share using clean, accurate data as a guide.
4. Omnichannel Commerce: Develop new products, onboard new products quickly, and manage a dynamic product catalog efficiently with clean and consistent product and reference data to fuel innovation, provide traceability, and increase speed to market.
5. Production Operations & Efficiency: Optimize yields, efficiency, and utilization – impacting lead times, quality, waste, and repairs in near real-time.
6. Supplier Management: Onboard suppliers in hours and minutes. Quickly source new suppliers and manage spend across first, second and third tier suppliers.
7. Warehousing & Transportation: Meet supply chain SLAs by ensuring complete visibility, ensuring assets can be located anywhere in the supply chain.
8. Supply Chain Collaboration: Share sales, product and logistics data with key trading partners while governing partner data, protecting sensitive internal data, like margins, and seamlessly managing complex EDI & EDIFACT data.
9. Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A): Ensure timely and accurate financial planning with clean, governed data. Protect financial data and rationalize systems during mergers, acquisitions and divestitures.  
10. Regulatory Governance, Compliance & ESG: Ensure customer data privacy, get ahead of compliance regulations (GDPR, CCPA), ESG compliance reporting, and regional traceability requirements (FSMA 204).

Data and AI can be used for any use case. These top 10 use cases are the most common in CPG across Informatica’s vast enterprise customer base, helping CPG brands deliver innovation and profitable growth and drive tangible business value. For a deeper dive and real-world customer examples, please take a look at our Top 10 CPG Data and AI Use Case Guide eBook.