How Embedding AI Is Accelerating Product Development Launch Cycles

Keep up or get left behind.

This seems to be the mantra that consumer goods companies must abide by as they face fierce competition to not only meet constantly evolving consumer demands but also face off with the constant churn of innovation from fellow brands.

“Technology has fundamentally reshaped the way consumer goods are developed, shifting from a linear, time-intensive process to an agile, data-driven, and highly automated approach,” Sana Hassan, a senior manager at Ernst & Young, tells CGT. “While consumer goods companies have been embedding data-driven decision-making at every step, from product innovation and R&D to shelf allocation based on consumer behavior, today’s scale of technology has elevated this transformation to unprecedented levels.”

Artificial intelligence has been embedded at nearly every step of product development, from product blueprint to computational design to 3D prototyping. Companies such as PepsiCo, Bic, L’Oreal, Newell, and Adidas have modernized their operations by harnessing these technologies. For many of these companies, the timeline from ideation to ready-to-market or pilot periods has shortened as a result.