When Chris Wright is asked about the efficiency gains he hopes to extract from artificial intelligence, the chief information officer at food giant Nestlé is quick to discourage an extensive focus on bottom-line savings.
“One of the big learnings we’ve had is don’t focus too much just on the efficiency” says Wright. “We’re finding in the way we track our business cases that the biggest value is in buying better, or reducing energy in a factory, not only being more humanly efficient.”
One pilot project that’s putting this viewpoint into practice is a generative AI assistant that can create fulfillment plans for distributors and retail customers. For years, Nestlé has standardized that process as much as possible, and for big customers—think Walmart and Target—order fulfillment is highly automated. But using AI in this manner can not just create the fulfillment plans faster than what a human can do, it can also produce better plans.
“That’s improving our customer order fulfillment, which can help us grow sales,” explains Wright.
It is also helpful for smaller retail customers that don’t have the digital might of a big-box retailer and still tend to place orders manually. AI is now being used to measure the impact of Nestlé’s sales recommendations that are offered to those smaller clients. Human representatives can spend some of the time they save on generating those fulfillment plans to now explain to those customers why these AI-generated plans best suit their needs. Customers that get that extra intel are proving to be more inclined to place the orders that Nestlé recommends.
