PepsiCo's journey towards responsibly scaling AI

PepsiCo products are enjoyed by consumers more than one billion times a day in more than 200 countries globally. Pepsi leverages AI across a wide range of use cases like product innovation, consumer insights, manufacturing, logistics, sales, financial planning, etc. It’s truly a Data & AI company that happens to make outstanding products.

I had the incredible honor of hosting Carla Eid , PepsiCo’s SVP, Data & AI Architecture & Governance at IBM’s annual flagship THINK event. Below is the replay of our fireside chat. Don't miss all the THINK keynote replays at: https://www.ibm.com/events/think

PepsiCo has a very structured approach to responsibly scaling Generative AI. Three key pillars of their approach are:

#1. Establishing a formal Responsible AI framework across the global enterprise. Carla shared that although they have been deploying AI for a while, last year marked a significant milestone as they established a formal Responsible AI framework and assembled a dedicated team to support it. They then developed comprehensive policies and standard operating procedures to operationalize their AI principles. The governance board helps streamline AI and GenAI ideas and PoCs from global teams by assessing, validating, and approving GenAI use cases against their responsible AI principles, sharing best practices and accelerators, and helping mitigate risks. PepsiCo now has a solid structure and operating model in place, and is constantly evolving.

#2. Creating a unified AI technology platform with reusable services. PepsiCo partnered with IBM Consulting to clearly articulate the necessary capabilities at each layer of their Data & AI North Star Architecture, ensuring that all definitions were mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE). This enabled PepsiCo to identify gaps in existing capabilities and objectively evaluate AI vendors. The team mapped high priority GenAI usecases to common standard architectural patterns which are now offered via a centralized GenAI platform. These reusable AI services, co-developed with IBM, provide accelerators for all teams to leverage, standardize deployment and expedite time to value. By leveraging AI technologies from IBM, Microsoft, and others, the platform provides comprehensive governance of models, inputs, and outputs. eg. PepsiCo is evaluating IBM's watsonx.governance for AI lifecycle risk management, observability etc. The below graphic shows how IBM is taking a platform approach with various organizations, so teams can go from managing their own models, governance etc. to a central platform that abstracts the complexity away from apps, and enables teams to focus on accelerating business value.

3. Fostering an AI culture through training and the adoption of responsible AI practices. PepsiCo has shared in the past that all their employees have a major and a minor so their learnings can be tailored to their specific job roles, and they understand where AI can augment their specific workflows.

This structured approach ensures that PepsiCo remains agile and adaptive in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

If you are curious about how PepsiCo is leveraging AI across the organization, listen to the POLITICO podcast below with Dr. Athina Kanioura, PepsiCo's Chief Strategy & Transformation Officer. AI has been a fundamental part of their Digital Transformation. eg. smart manufacturing, intelligent automated financial planning, fleet management, dynamic real-time routing. Great talk.

PepsiCo has been an industry leader in Responsible AI. Last summer they announced a collaboration with the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, an organization dedicated to guiding and building the future of artificial intelligence. As the first CPG company to join Stanford HAI's Corporate Affiliate Program, PepsiCo aims to be the global corporate leader in industrialized AI applications and responsible AI and gain insights that advance research, education, policy and practice throughout the industry.

It's been such a pleasure collaborating with the PepsiCo leadership - Magesh Bagavathi , Carla Eid , Nachiket Karajagi , Gaston Besanson , David S. , Eric Potter, Sid Manohar , Dhaivat Parikh , Dr. Srinivas Telukunta , Venkat Cherukuri , S K and broader PepsiCo family.

Cheers to the IBM Consulting ninjas - Ambhi Ganesan , Sandhya Ranganathan Iyer , Venkat Krishnan , Sonali Rajendra , Hitesh Khanna , Utsav Dholakia , Buddy Ballentine , Matt Bellio , Kara Vohra , Trapti Kalra , Debjyoti Aich and the boarder IBM family.

Big shout out to our strategic partners: IBM Tech - Oliver Birch , Jade Chen , Manish Bhide , Ian Francis , and Microsoft - Sunil Samantaray , Chris Caldwell , Sean Bryson

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