Nestle & General Mills’ CPW Join AB InBev In Adopting GPT-4 BI Assistant

Anheuser-Busch InBev, Nestle, and General Mills are among the companies integrating an AI assistant that uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model for consumer goods business intelligence discovery.  

Nestle and General Mills’ joint venture Cereal Partners Worldwide (CPW), which includes more than 50 brands, will leverage AnswerRocket’s Max assistant to improve their ability to access insights from their own data. Using the technology, employees can ask natural language questions, which is expected to break down a common adoption barrier within business intelligence. 

Being able to ask intuitive questions and receive easy-to-read, understandable answers will increase employee engagement, Chris Potter, global applied analytics at CPW, tells CGT.  

“Knowing how to ask questions of the data is a skill in itself,” he says. “Max will help solve this for colleagues that need to build data-based insights but perhaps have a more basic understanding of the data.”

• See also: How Generative AI Could Overhaul the Consumer Goods Industry and Red Flags to Look For

CPW already teams with AnswerRocket for data insights, and this partnership extension is anticipated to enable its wider business to benefit as well, Potter says, both directly and indirectly. CPW will need to build data-based arguments and insights, and they expect the global hub will use the technology as its go-to data and insights tool this year.

“The ability for more of our business to be able to act fast, using fact-based decisions will support the global and regional teams as we move forward,” notes Potter. 

AB InBev similarly expects the technology to help users become more comfortable interacting with data, according to Sabine Van den Bergh, director brand strategy and insights Europe, in a statement. 

“Having an on-demand assistant that can quickly answer the questions that pop up throughout the day would enable our team to make data-driven decisions at scale,” she says. 

Generative AI Marches On

There’s no shortage of potential use cases for generative AI tools like ChatGPT, which leverage artificial intelligence algorithms to quickly produce conversational content. While concerns about the technology’s rapid expansion abound, consumer goods companies have been quick to experiment across functions, including marketing.   

The technology is really something that can impact companies in their day to day, Diana Haussling, VP, GM consumer experience and growth at Colgate-Palmolive, said at Shoptalk last week. 

“If you work at CPG organizations like mine, which have been around for 200-plus years, it’s really about being prepared for where the consumer is going, how they’re shopping, and making the most of your most important resources, which is your human capital,” Haussling said.