In a recent McKinsey podcast, John Straw, senior advisor at McKinsey and Company and disruptive technologies expert, said that the biggest mistake he sees CPG companies making right now is not investing in AI technologies. If companies want to survive—let alone thrive—adopting AI is no longer optional, Straw notes.
This post looks at the rise of AI in the CPG industry and its implications and also highlights the challenges and opportunities laid down in the industry’s path to growth.
2020 was the inflection point in the CPG industry, posing enough challenges to give the CEO, COO, and CFO nightmares. Multiple demand and supply-side problems made it difficult for company leaders to make projections about the market, predict their performance, or estimate how much revenue they would generate.
Despite this, a recent McKinsey report said: “CPG industry experienced intense growth during the pandemic, demonstrating more growth in 2020 than in the four years from 2016 to 2019.”
Isn’t that incredible?
This growth reflects the massive technology innovation shift taking place in the market.
According to the same report, the crucial considerations for CPG industry leaders amidst this change include understanding the 2021 cost outlook, making resiliency a C-suite-level conversation, capturing growth while controlling costs, and adapting marketing and customer-loyalty programs to a rapidly evolving environment.
Adapting to this changing environment will increase the demand for robust engineering talent in the CPG industry.
Opportunity areas for the CPG industry
New opportunities are being created for CPG retailers by technology innovations with each passing day.
But what do we mean by technology innovations?
Technology innovations in the CPG industry
Technology innovations refer to the convergence of artificial intelligence, blockchain, IoT, and cloud that provides a personalized, just-in-time, localized experience for the end customer. For example, a recent study revealed that 65 percent of the consumers switched brand loyalty in the last year alone because of stockouts. Stockouts are a problem that AI, blockchain, and IoT can solve.
And thus, if you are not able to serve different technology aspects within your business as a CPG retailer, you’re set to lose out to your competition.
What are the challenges CPG industry leaders face today?
CPG leaders must regularly tackle several challenges—from hiring the right people to getting technology innovation projects kicked off.
The CPG industry is set up in a very globalized manner regarding how the industry players do their business. So, you’ll see a very globalized supply chain for each CPG company. However, when it comes to hiring, the companies are still very localized.
This hiring constraint results from the legal challenges of having to do business or hiring from regions only where you have a legal presence.
So, when a CPG company needs to hire AI or blockchain engineers, they face several constraints in finding the right talent at the right time.
And most importantly, hiring great engineering talent has been a significant hurdle for CPG companies. This obstacle arises because the CPGs are constantly under threat from the big techs of the world. After all, the big techs are known to attract the best talent when it comes to hiring.
So to sum up, the challenges faced by the CPG industry are:
Challenge Number One – Constrained to the local talent pool
Challenge Number Two – Stiff competition from the tech industry
Challenge Number Three – Dial-in hiring is a very cumbersome process
So, the CPG industry leaders are currently looking at three-prong challenges as to how, when, and where they will get their innovation at top speed.
How is Turing positioned to help these CPG industry leaders?
How is Turing positioned to help CPG industry leaders?
We now live in a remote-first world. Every company is in a race to reap the benefits of remote engineering talent. Turing has built an Intelligent Talent Cloud of highly-skilled developers who have been rigorously vetted to a Silicon Valley standard on 100+ technology stacks. Turing’s platform combines a planetary reach with AI to deliver your ideal engineers, billed by the month.
But what does this mean for the customer?
Significantly reduced hiring time, engineering velocity, and dependency on other vendors
With Turing’s Intelligent Talent Cloud, CPG industry leaders won’t wait for several weeks to hire top engineers. They won’t need to rely on their service vendors or hiring operations teams to get the best talent. Instead, Turing will match them with their desired engineers in less than a week.
Excellent administrative support
After making a successful match, Turing ensures time zone overlap, transparency, and reliable communication between the developer and the company. Turing’s platform also takes care of global HR and payroll, including developer support, making it easy for managers and developers to securely collaborate and abstract away the complexity of hiring international workers.
Access to a boundaryless talent pool
Turing enables CPG industry companies to hire top-quality engineers from all over the world. Companies can access a talent pool of over a million highly skilled developers from over 140 countries, capable of working with over 100 different programming languages. No longer do hiring companies have to be limited to the talent available within a particular geography. Instead, Turing’s Intelligent Talent Cloud can help them unleash the world’s untapped human potential.
Projects that stay on the timeline
Numerous projects get delayed because of the lack of the right resources. After the match, Turing makes remote development easy, compliant and secure. And thus, the leaders don’t have to worry about their project timelines getting compromised.
So this is the difference that Turing aims to bring into the CPG industry using its Intelligent Talent Cloud. For example, suppose you have a team of talented engineers who could help you get your technology innovation projects kicked off on time. In that case, the impact you make as an organization would be pretty incredible. With Turing, you can spin up your engineering dream team in no time.
If you’re looking to change the status quo of your hiring process and how you go about your innovation business, book a consultation call with me. I will be having to set up some time with you and take you through what Turing is doing in space. You can also visit our Jobs page for more information.
How is the rise of artificial intelligence in the CPG industry creating new business opportunities for CPG companies? Turing's AVP of Business Development answers.
Vaibhav is a Global Sales Professional with demonstrated experience of Account Management, Business Development, Corporate R&D Strategy across AI, and Big Data.
