AI-Driven Product Development

The Analytics Advantage study focuses on retail and consumer goods. From this research you can see that CPG companies are focusing largely on “Evolving Transformation” but only 23% of these organizations are focusing on consumer insights. The challenges are ones that you’re all very aware of, particularly within the industry; the right staff not in place, culture resistance, absence of clear strategy, budget, and limited analytics toolset. What seems to stand out as the over-arching problem is resources but there have been some cases within the industry where consumer product development with AI has seen great success, such as 雀巢 .?

Before you celebrate those wins, however, it is critical that we dive into the why and how.?

AI offers brands the opportunity to reinvent the way that things are done with digital assets. Instead of it taking a researcher years to do anything, AI can make predictions based on decades of data that skips a few arduous steps for research and development. The human approach is limited but with the power of AI, it becomes an unstoppable force.??

Beyond changing processes, AI can also assist in developing materials in a new way, generating early proof points and making multiple predictions at once.??

Instead of figuring out the goal as the innovation takes place, you can identify what you want to achieve and work towards it. This shift from optimizing for one aspect to multiple aspects means that CPG pain points are no longer such a hurdle.??

Historical success was a key part of current product development but AI offers a vastly superior alternative based on predictive science.??

It is important to remember that with every new approach, there is room for error. This is no different, the sheer volume of data available means that without correctly filtering what is useful and what isn’t you could find yourself with AI that isn’t truly assisting your product evolution.??

What CPG companies require for this to be a triumph is a front end that is user-friendly and links to only the valuable data, such as for new packaging – predicted attention.?

The younger teams expect digital toolsets at their disposal so this is somewhat of a culture problem. What stands out heads above the rest as a competitive advantage is speed, this is what will continue to nudge the resistance towards AI solutions.?

CPG companies need to jump in to feel the true benefits and they can do this by leveraging AI for product innovation success.?

Stuart Pecksen ?? , Product Owner at Dragonfly AI , agrees and adds;

"The recent emergence of readily available AI tech means that we are at the start of a drastic period of exponential change in the world of product development, be it digital or otherwise. Change in how quickly we produce things, update or upgrade things, change in how we analyze things. Being able to use predictive AI?takes away a painstaking, time-consuming aspect of many roles and instead lets you focus on what's important - the insights that the collated data provides or would have provided.?The equivalent in my world would be AI that could predict customer engagement with digital products; how sticky will this feature be? How much will this improve our user experience? How will this impact user growth? Being able to measure these things before implementing would make feedback loops almost infinitely shorter. I'm sure tools like that will come but as of right now, for some industries, those tools exist and early adopters are making the most of them."

Let’s circle back to Nestlé.?

雀巢 established value through consumer analytics and grew their eCommerce sales by 9.2% last year as a result. Their clever tapping into AI for tracking and enhancing over 500,000 digital assets meant an impressive 66% return on ad spend.??

So, why choose AI-driven product development??

• Speed?
• Higher ROI?
• Reinvent process?
• Evolve?
• Compete effectively in 2023?