General Mills’ Digital Roadmap: Agentic Infrastructure, Digital Twins, AI Personas

General Mills has been on a digital transformation runway since 2020, implementing end-to-end solutions that now layer agentic and cloud-based capabilities onto a data framework built for customization.

The company is seeing significant benefits as a result of these upgrades, according to statements from General Mills’ supply chain and digital innovation leaders, shared during a recent investors conference. 

Building a Digital Transformation Roadmap

General Mills’ tech strategy has revolved around three pillars: technology, process and people. On the technology front, it moved operations to the cloud, built a connected data foundation and upgraded its core SAP systems to S4, said Jaime Montemayor, chief digital and technology officer. 

Since 2021, all of the company’s tech has been running on the cloud. And the data foundation has enabled General Mills to accelerate its investments in data, analytics and AI. 

“In process, there was a strong focus on data governance and ethical systems, and you will see how that investment that we made since the beginning of 2020 is paying off today because our data is perhaps as clean as it needs to be for us to accelerate AI investments,” he said.

Also: How General Mills is accelerating tech-enabled growth

Paul Gallagher, chief supply chain officer, added that this governance structure hasn’t been just around the master data that goes into its SAP system, but also operational and transactional data, resulting in a data accuracy rate of about 97%.

“We’ve got one version of the truth. It’s great to have the data, but the second part is that you have to use the data … let the data make the decision,” said Gallagher, stating that this approach has so far yielded $300 million of savings over the last three years.