The number came first
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 as it rolls out a Gemini assistant grounded in its own assortment, pricing, and availability data. General Mills has tied more than $20 million in supply-chain savings to AI demand sensing since 2024. Coca-Cola is using AI in revenue growth management to serve premium and value shoppers at a precision no human team can hold.
Three different rooms of the P&L: the storefront, the supply chain, the price. One move underneath, and it is not "they bought AI."
The number came first
Each one decided which number had to move before building anything. Kroger chose e-commerce operating profit. General Mills chose cost-to-serve. Coca-Cola chose price realization. The number came first. The technology came second. That ordering defined the destination and then execution.
Now the contrast. The surveys keep landing on the same split: roughly three in four leaders call AI a top priority, but barely a third can point to a financial return, and more than half report no benefit yet. That is not a technology gap. Starting a pilot requires no decision. Naming the P&L line it answers to forces one, and most organizations quietly decline.
The encoded decision is the moat
Here is the part that should change how you fund this. None of the three is winning on the model. They rent the same engines their competitors can. What they own is the decision encoded into the system: which number it serves, on whose economics, using which proprietary data. That encoded decision is the moat, and it is the one line no competitor can buy.
So the board question this year is not "are we doing AI." Everyone is doing AI. It is narrower and more uncomfortable: which decision are we encoding, in which room, against which number.
AI is taking over the how. These three decided the where. That is the whole contest now.
Part of a larger thesis: the Destination Problem, on why, as execution goes abundant, judgment becomes the moat.
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