Consumer packaged goods businesses today struggle with understanding wildly fluctuating consumption patterns. Customer sentiments are also quite complicated. Aggressive marketing strategies followed by some companies heavily alter customer behavior. Customer expectations also keep changing. To keep up with all this and actually make their business ready for the future of retail, CPG businesses now use artificial intelligence in many ways. The benefits of AI for consumer packaged goods companies can be felt in logistics, customer service, and several other processes.

Timely deliveries become a reality
In the CPG industry, logistics can have a crucial impact on customer experience. When it comes to doorstep deliveries, it is a highly competitive market out there. Same-day deliveries are available in most cities and even scheduled deliveries are quite common. Customers look at this as an essential feature so as to plan these deliveries based on their availability. There are so many factors that influence last-mile deliveries. So, using a traditional statistics-based approach for logistics might not really help businesses achieve on-time delivery. AI helps in optimum route identification. It provides real-time data based on actual factors that impact deliveries. This helps in suggesting more realistic delivery slots based on weather conditions, traffic, and availability of delivery partners. For businesses with thousands of deliveries to handle per day like food delivery apps or even grocery deliveries, AI transforms the delivery game. It becomes easy for businesses to offer shortest delivery times by efficient management of available resources. On-time delivery every time means better customer retention. AI is what you need to become the best customer experience company in the CPG industry.

Efficient waste management as an approach towards sustainability
Sustainability is one of the strongest areas to focus if you wish for your CPG to emerge as a strong brand. Letting waste management go out of hand can affect the business’ reputation. So, in order to stand out in the competition and progress consistently, CPG businesses can use AI for creating efficient waste management strategies. In fact, customers today are also becoming more responsible shoppers. They favor businesses that adopt more sustainable practices in their processes. Defective machines can cause increased fuel consumption. Improper inventory planning can lead to increased waste production. AI helps avoid all these. Predictive maintenance improves fuel efficiency of machines in CPG industries. Smart inventory planning with continuous inputs based on current market trends helps CPG business to purchase only as much raw material stock as would be consumed. These are just a few examples of how AI helps CPG businesses reduce waste.

Demand-based planning
Planning the raw material inventory as well as plans for product lines to focus on would be so much better with intelligent insights from AI solutions. AI helps in the better understanding of existing demands. You would also have clear reports on the factors that affect this demand. Seasonal patterns, cues based on time of the year or demand patterns based on connected markets can be difficult to comprehend. There is a large volume of data from various data sources. Identifying patterns from seemingly unrelated data would be possible with an efficiently trained machine learning model. When it comes to allocating budgets for different projects/products, AI-based insights are handy. Some product lines yield good profits from day one. There are others that pickup slowly but provide steady cashflow. And there are others that help CPG businesses stand ahead in competition. AI is what your business needs in order to identify these categories. Long-term plans for the business would be more accurate with the help of AI. Demand forecasting is not a new concept but better accuracy in a growing digital data landscape is the benefit offered by artificial intelligence.

With a traditional approach, your business would still be able to survive in the CPD industry. But if you wish to meet the changing needs of customers, AI might make things better. With AI you can keep up with the fast-paced online vs. offline shopping experience that customers expect. Better deliveries, personalized shopping experience and several other aspects of integrating

AI for consumer packaged goods
businesses make these businesses ready for the future of retail. This keeps the customers happy and the businesses marching strongly ahead in a volatile environment.