PepsiCo to Work Closely With AWS on Cloud-Based, Agentic AI-First Roadmap
PepsiCo is expanding its relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS), adding on a multi-year roadmap.
The ultimate goal will be to drive end-to-end artificial intelligence- and cloud-based optimizations (with a focus on agentic AI) that transform global operations and professional services, the supply chain, go-to-market strategies and personalization.
When looking for an external partner, PepsiCo considered the following:
- It needed someone who could bring expertise in data, algorithms and technical systems.
- The broader ecosystem of AWS would help PepsiCo tap into deep knowledge of consumer preferences from Amazon while also pairing it with a strong tech offering.
- An established professional services network would allow PepsiCo to accelerate transformation within its own system.
“How can we leverage the know-how of how they do it with the algorithmic aspects, digital twins, etc., and use that for our own ecosystem?” posed Kanioura.
PepsiCo began working with AWS in 2016, and in 2018, scaled it to be a more enterprise-wide collaboration, according to Kanioura.
The partnership will include:
Enhanced capabilities within PepsiCo's internal generative AI platform, PepGenX. By integrating Amazon Bedrock, PepsiCo developers and technical teams will be able to choose between multi-modal foundation models and agentic AI capabilities to build applications.
Enhanced personalization and consumer experiences through real-time insights into advertising performance and audience segmentation, with access to Amazon’s targeted marketing capabilities.
End-to-end digital supply chain capabilities, including predictive maintenance for manufacturing and logistics operations.
Cloud migration and IT modernization so it can quickly build, test, iterate and implement new tech capabilities for customers and employees.
Dr. Athina Kanioura, chief strategy and transformation officer at PepsiCo, says the company was already 65% to 70% there with its cloud strategy, but it wanted to accelerate the timeline to reach 95% in order to achieve new levels of agility and scalability.
Also: PepsiCo talked agentic AI and enterprise automations at NRF.
Agentic AI Use Cases
Kanioura and team are using a three-pronged approach for the investment, looking at agentic AI applications within contact centers, upskilling and reskilling, and optimizing logistics and warehouse transformation.
Within contact centers, PepsiCo looks to enable an ecosystem that is deployed using Amazon Connect, Salesforce and the company’s own AI platform.
“We're going to put agentic AI across the spectrum. … It will be an ecosystem of agents that we want to deploy for the transformation of services within PepsiCo,” says Kanioura, adding that this partnership is just part of an overall strategy to be agentic AI-first.
Additionally, PepsiCo will optimize the way it designs warehouses and stands them up, with the goal of minimizing movement and leaning on intelligent automations.
Measuring the Results of a Cross-Functional Collaboration
More and more, the work PepsiCo has been doing on transformation is cross-functional, says Kanioura.
“We started years ago with the functional transformation space, which was very topical within the function. Now we are transforming our processes and using actual AI to be able to do that across the board.”
As the company’s strategy and transformation officer, Kanioura oversees this initiative on behalf of the company, but also orchestration across the function. This then allows employees to be a part of the journey without having the historical friction of which function owns a specific transformation.
“We have established what we call ‘mission-based teams.’ They go after those big transformational programs — managed and orchestrated by my organization, so we can drive speed and faster execution,” she says.
The company will be leaning on its value realization framework through which it tracks the benefits of every transformation program on a monthly basis. Once a quarter, PepsiCo reports its progress to its executive committee.
“As part of the strategic partnership," says Kanioura, "we have joint goals of success — KPIs that we both said we want to achieve as part of the transformation, which include: in the case of innovation, portfolio; top line performance and incrementality in the case of supply chain; and operational productivity.”
