PepsiCo is wiring AI into revenue growth management and even named the muscle: Decision Engineering. Why AI's first durable win in consumer goods is in the pricing room, and why the moat is the decision you engineer, not the model you rent.
Kroger, General Mills, and Coca-Cola each made a serious AI move this year. The three press releases read as unrelated. They are not. Three different rooms of the P&L Kroger is pointing AI at e-commerce operating profit. It expects roughly $400 million of improvement in 2026
Over the past few weeks, two headlines crossed most consumer leaders' desks as unrelated. One was about how people shop. One about how AI gets procured. Together they retire an assumption the industry has run on for 20 years. Demand: the journey is compressing to a single turn Start
For thirty years, advantage in consumer industries came from execution. Better forecasting, tighter supply chains, sharper campaigns, faster checkout. The winners were the ones who ran the machine best. With the onset of AI and agents, that machine is now starting to run itself, today in parts, tomorrow in full.