Industry Report Says Cross-Functional Misalignment Remains Top RGM Barrier
Cross-functional misalignment hinders consumer packaged goods companies' ability to keep pace as they scale revenue growth management, even as organizations ramp up artificial intelligence experimentation, indicating that experimentation outpaces execution.
This is the key finding of Buynomics’ Future of RGM Report 2027, a global study of 107 commercial leaders conducted July 8 through Aug. 27, examining how CPG organizations make commercial decisions amid slowing price-led growth and rising private-label competition.
For the second consecutive year, 56% of respondents identified cross-functional misalignment as the primary barrier to scaling RGM, down from 63% in 2026. In addition, 51% cited conflicting priorities or key performance indicators across functions as a barrier to implementing previously made RGM recommendations.
"Better models don't drive better decisions, but decision rights do,” Ilia Keshishev, global RGM lead at Danone, said in a statement. “The bottleneck is in conversion, not the analysis: 51% of respondents point to conflicting KPIs across functions and 48% to retailer constraints. A sound recommendation stalls not because the analysis is weak, but because there's no decision architecture around it. Without that structure, RGM fails in the Monday-morning sales meeting, not the strategy room.”
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Scaled or fully integrated AI adoption increased by only 1 percentage point, from 15% to 16% over the past year. This occurred even as the number of organizations piloting limited use cases rose from 45% to 61%.
RGM teams with no AI adoption decreased from 40% to 23%, indicating that experimentation is outpacing execution and that the gap between them is widening.
Investment faces a similar gap between priorities and constraints, with trade promotion effectiveness and optimization ranking as the top investment priorities for the second consecutive year, according to 59% of respondents. This follows 34% of respondents identifying capability building as a top scaling challenge and 29% planning to decrease their investment in it.
Only 23.4% of respondents plan to increase investment in the RGM team and in capability building in 2027, even though the same gap is frequently cited as a barrier to scaling.
