Why Smart CPG Leaders Are Rethinking Their AI Strategy to Maximise Consumer Insight Value

Have you noticed how every technology vendor, consultant, and industry publication is telling you that your AI Strategy is the solution to all your business challenges?


The pressure to invest heavily in AI capabilities has never been greater for CPG executives.

Yet many leadership teams ask a fundamental question: How do we separate genuine opportunities from expensive distractions?

This question becomes particularly challenging when it comes to customer understanding.

While an effective AI strategy promises unprecedented insights into consumer behaviour, the path from investment to measurable business impact remains unclear for many leadership teams.

If you would rather listen than read:

The Reality of AI Strategy Investment in CPG Today

Let’s start with some sobering numbers.
According to McKinsey’s recent analysis, while 70% of CPG companies are implementing some form of AI initiative, only 22% report significant business impact from these investments.
The disconnect between implementation and value creation isn’t surprising when you consider that many companies approach AI as a technology solution rather than a business transformation.

The executives I work with often share a common frustration: they’ve invested millions in AI platforms and data lakes, yet still struggle to generate actionable customer insights that drive revenue growth.
One global beverage company CIO recently confided,

”We have more data than ever, but less clarity on what our customers actually want.”

This disconnect exists because technology alone can’t create customer understanding.
The most sophisticated AI systems are only as valuable as the business questions they’re designed to answer and the actions they enable.

Building a Strategic Framework for AI Investment

When working with CPG leadership teams, I’ve found that successful AI strategies share a common foundation: they start with strategic business objectives rather than technological capabilities.

Rather than asking “How can we implement AI?” successful executives ask:

  1. Which customer-related business challenges, if solved, would create substantial value?
  2. Where are our current gaps in customer understanding creating barriers to growth?
  3. How might AI-generated insights enable better strategic decision-making?

This approach shifts the focus from technological implementation to business transformation. This is a subtle but critical distinction that separates high-ROI investments from expensive experiments.

Consider how Miyoko’s Creamery approached this challenge.
As a pioneer in plant-based dairy alternatives, they faced the dual challenge of understanding both their core vegan consumers and the much larger segment of flexitarians they needed to attract for mainstream growth.
Rather than broadly implementing AI across their organization, they identified specific high-value decision points where enhanced customer understanding would drive measurable business outcomes.

They focused initially on product formulation and messaging optimization, using AI to analyze consumer sentiment around taste, texture, and functionality in both their owned channels and broader food conversations.
Their system identified that “performance” messaging (how the product melts, stretches, etc.) resonated more strongly with flexitarians than sustainability or ethical messaging.

According to Miyoko’s Series C funding announcement, this targeted approach helped them reformulate their flagship products and reframe their marketing to emphasize culinary performance. This delivered a 40% increase in repeat purchase rates among … Click to continue reading

Three Clever Ways to Know the Competition Better

What is the secret to success in business? That’s easy! It’s how well you know the competition.

Alright, maybe this is a slightly over-simplified perspective, but it always surprises me how many companies work with a primarily internal focus.

I have written many posts about knowing your customers, such as “Why Customers Are The Answer To All Your Problems (If You Ask the Right Questions).” Watching and listening to them in order to fully understand their rational needs and emotional desires is a great – and free! – way to start.

But today I would like to speak about doing exactly the same thing for your competitors. If you are going to succeed in attracting their customers away from their products and services, then it would make sense to know them as well as you do your own.

Here’s a simple three-step process to do so. 

 

Encourage employees to use competitive products & services

Know the competition better by trying their products and services.In most organisations today, using competitive products is still frowned upon; after all, we make the best don’t we, so why use those of other companies?

However to challenge and beat the competition you have to intimately know what you are up against. Regular contact with competitive products will encourage your employees to evaluate your own offering. They will also be encouraged to suggest competitors’ strengths and weaknesses that were perhaps not evident before. It will also ensure that you are rapidly aware of any improvements made by the competition. You won’t get left behind and find yourself suffering from declining sales due to competitive improvements of which you are unaware.

This intimacy with competitors’ products and customers should be requested of employees at all levels, by being one of their annual objectives. Of course, in some industries this might not be possible, due to the selective nature of the product or service, but certainly for most consumer products and service companies, this can easily be done on a regular basis.

Now encouraging people to use competitive products is easy to say, but you should also be prepared to invest in it, by paying for your employees to experience them. It would be unfair, and would certainly be resented, if your people had to spend their own money to make such experiences. This knowledge gathering should be seen as an investment by your organisation, of at least equal value to offering your employees discounts on your own products and services.

Why don’t you start a similar process and add these experiences to everyone’s annual objectives? It’s a great way, and a free one at that, to know the competition better than you do today.

 

Make a Library of Competitive Products and Material

KNow your competition better by sharing what you knowIn one of my previous positions, the company had an incredible competitive library. This included every single competitive product that was available from all around the world, classified by country and organised by segment.

Everyone found this library extremely useful, especially when discussing such topics as shelf impact, packaging or in … Click to continue reading

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