“After largely failing to grasp the internet, social media, smartphones and e-commerce quickly enough to avoid significant pain, many businesses have already gotten onboard with AI.
Many potentially transformative applications of artificial intelligence remain hypothetical, of course. Researchers are still assessing the strengths and significant limits of reasoning models. Cybersecurity professionals emphasize the risk of connecting AI with private company data. Regulators, lawmakers and advocates want rules to protect humans on the whole from out-of-control AI.
Meanwhile, 88% of enterprises declare they are undertaking an AI transformation, according to research from McKinsey.
I wanted to know what was different with this particular tech era, so I asked Athina Kanioura, chief strategy and transformation officer at PepsiCo, which has been deploying AI for years.
"For the first time with a new technology, there is a pervasive true fear at the senior leadership level that AI will fundamentally disrupt the business model at its core," she said. "The potential for GenAI to completely rewire how value is created is so profound that no large company can afford to wait."
PepsiCo, a food and drinks giant with nearly $92 billion in revenue last year, began by applying machine learning to areas such as demand planning and predictive asset maintenance in manufacturing facilities.
Then it moved to extracting insights from data collected in warehouses and manufacturing plants. It connected autonomous vehicles in those facilities with an "AI control tower" that made work for human employees safer and more efficient.
It added generative AI to the mix about 2 1/2 years ago in areas including research and development and innovation, logistics and taking orders from other businesses.
PepsiCo is also using agents from Salesforce to manage key operations including some sales functions and customer support procurement, sourcing, compensation advice and IT support tickets.
"There is no reason for a human to [have] to do those type of tasks," Kanioura said.
Agents are better suited for many of the duties involved because they can more readily access knowledge from systems across the company.
The human role then shifts to high-value advisory work, such as having conversations with employees about career paths or significant life events, Kanioura said.
The company hasn't fired people because of the shift to AI, but AI allows it to grow without adding staff in ways it needed to in the past, she said.
AI has proved easier to adopt than previous technological shifts because there are lower barriers to adoption and it lends itself to an accessible user experience for both businesses and their customers, Kanioura said. While companies need to invest in data infrastructure, governance and security, they don't have to create a new physical infrastructure as they did with the rise of e-commerce.
Companies believe they can measure the effect of AI on their business and that of their customers. At PepsiCo, Kanioura says PepsiCo operates under a strict mandate: "Every AI initiative must have a clear top-line and bottom-line impact that is tracked and measured before activation."
She declined to share specific numbers, but said The bottom-line impact on customer service, for example, is "very significant" due to increased efficiency and effectiveness [1], she said. Improved service levels directly translate to higher sales to distributors and other customers, she said.
The benefit to employee experience is measured in saved hours that boost productivity.
PepsiCo's agent deployment based on Salesforce tech is under way in the Americas, she said, with Europe, Asia, and Africa to follow, "demonstrating a methodical, global deployment strategy built on a solid data foundation and clear process mapping."
Kanioura said large language models, while powerful, still lack sustained context, consistency and true agency. Considering the time, cost and talent required to solve those problems, she said PepsiCo decided to "fill those gaps" by building within the Salesforce platform [2], tapping into existing resources such as a semantic layer of software and application programming interfaces.
There is another motivation for companies' speedy adoption that lurks not so far behind all the others: Executives just don't want to wake up behind the curve again. If their sectors are going to be as disrupted as everybody is telling them, this time they want to at least have a hand in events.
Whether 88% of businesses have the experience, tech savvy and imagination to make much of AI in the near term is an open question. Some would say certainly not. And only 5% of the AI adopters in McKinsey's research said they have succeeded in transforming even a single business domain to achieve a measurable bottom-line impact. But businesses remain comfortable embracing AI, according to Alexander Sukharevsky, McKinsey senior partner and global leader of QuantumBlack, McKinsey's AI arm.
Executives acknowledge the risks and limits of AI. They just see them as management challenges. The existential danger, to them, now lies in the failure to adapt.” [1]
1. Efficiency and effectiveness, while often used together, represent distinct concepts. Efficiency focuses on doing things right, minimizing waste and maximizing output with available resources. Effectiveness, on the other hand, focuses on doing the right things, ensuring that goals are achieved and desired outcomes are reached.
What is the Difference Between Efficiency and Effectiveness?
Efficiency:
Minimizing waste:
Efficient processes use resources like time, money, and materials effectively, reducing or eliminating waste.
Optimizing resources:
Efficiency involves making the most of available resources to achieve a task.
Focus on the means:
Efficiency is about how work is done.
Example:
A manufacturing plant that reduces waste material and shortens production time is becoming more efficient.
Effectiveness:
Achieving goals: Effectiveness is about achieving the desired outcome or result.
Focus on the end: Effectiveness is about what is achieved.
Prioritizing the right tasks: Effective individuals and organizations focus on tasks that directly contribute to their goals.
Example: A marketing campaign that successfully increases brand awareness and sales is effective.
In essence:
Efficiency: is about doing something with the least amount of effort, cost, or waste.
Effectiveness: is about achieving the desired result or outcome.
Ideally, organizations should strive for both efficiency and effectiveness to optimize their operations and achieve their goals.
2. Salesforce is a cloud-based software company that specializes in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and related business applications. It offers a suite of tools and services designed to help businesses manage customer interactions, streamline sales processes, automate marketing campaigns, and improve overall customer experience. In essence, Salesforce provides a platform for businesses to connect with customers, manage data, and drive growth.
Here's a more detailed breakdown:
Core Functionality:
CRM:
Salesforce is primarily known for its CRM platform, which helps businesses manage customer data, track interactions, and build stronger relationships.
Sales Cloud:
This module focuses on sales force automation, lead management, opportunity tracking, and sales forecasting.
Service Cloud:
This module helps businesses manage customer service and support, including case management, knowledge bases, and self-service portals.
Marketing Cloud:
This module enables businesses to create and manage marketing campaigns, automate email marketing, and personalize customer journeys.
Commerce Cloud:
This module helps businesses build and manage e-commerce websites and online stores.
Salesforce Platform:
This is a broader platform that allows developers to build custom applications and integrations on top of Salesforce, extending its functionality.
Einstein AI:
Salesforce utilizes AI, known as Einstein, to provide insights, automate tasks, and personalize customer experiences.
Key Benefits:
Improved Customer Relationships:
Salesforce helps businesses understand their customers better, personalize interactions, and build stronger, more lasting relationships.
Increased Sales:
By streamlining sales processes, improving lead management, and providing better tools for sales teams, Salesforce can help businesses close more deals and increase revenue.
Enhanced Productivity:
Salesforce provides tools that automate tasks, improve collaboration, and provide a single source of truth for customer data, leading to increased productivity for employees.
Data-Driven Decisions:
Salesforce offers tools for data analysis and reporting, enabling businesses to make more informed decisions based on data insights.
Scalability and Flexibility:
Salesforce is a cloud-based platform, meaning it can scale to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes and adapt to changing business requirements.
Companies Embrace AI More Speedily Than They Did Other Tech Innovations
“After largely failing to grasp the internet, social media, smartphones and e-commerce quickly enough to avoid significant pain, many businesses have already gotten onboard with AI.
Many potentially transformative applications of artificial intelligence remain hypothetical, of course. Researchers are still assessing the strengths and significant limits of reasoning models. Cybersecurity professionals emphasize the risk of connecting AI with private company data. Regulators, lawmakers and advocates want rules to protect humans on the whole from out-of-control AI.
Meanwhile, 88% of enterprises declare they are undertaking an AI transformation, according to research from McKinsey.
I wanted to know what was different with this particular tech era, so I asked Athina Kanioura, chief strategy and transformation officer at PepsiCo, which has been deploying AI for years.
"For the first time with a new technology, there is a pervasive true fear at the senior leadership level that AI will fundamentally disrupt the business model at its core," she said. "The potential for GenAI to completely rewire how value is created is so profound that no large company can afford to wait."
PepsiCo, a food and drinks giant with nearly $92 billion in revenue last year, began by applying machine learning to areas such as demand planning and predictive asset maintenance in manufacturing facilities.
Then it moved to extracting insights from data collected in warehouses and manufacturing plants. It connected autonomous vehicles in those facilities with an "AI control tower" that made work for human employees safer and more efficient.
It added generative AI to the mix about 2 1/2 years ago in areas including research and development and innovation, logistics and taking orders from other businesses.
PepsiCo is also using agents from Salesforce to manage key operations including some sales functions and customer support procurement, sourcing, compensation advice and IT support tickets.
"There is no reason for a human to [have] to do those type of tasks," Kanioura said.
Agents are better suited for many of the duties involved because they can more readily access knowledge from systems across the company.
The human role then shifts to high-value advisory work, such as having conversations with employees about career paths or significant life events, Kanioura said.
The company hasn't fired people because of the shift to AI, but AI allows it to grow without adding staff in ways it needed to in the past, she said.
AI has proved easier to adopt than previous technological shifts because there are lower barriers to adoption and it lends itself to an accessible user experience for both businesses and their customers, Kanioura said. While companies need to invest in data infrastructure, governance and security, they don't have to create a new physical infrastructure as they did with the rise of e-commerce.
Companies believe they can measure the effect of AI on their business and that of their customers. At PepsiCo, Kanioura says PepsiCo operates under a strict mandate: "Every AI initiative must have a clear top-line and bottom-line impact that is tracked and measured before activation."
She declined to share specific numbers, but said The bottom-line impact on customer service, for example, is "very significant" due to increased efficiency and effectiveness [1], she said. Improved service levels directly translate to higher sales to distributors and other customers, she said.
The benefit to employee experience is measured in saved hours that boost productivity.
PepsiCo's agent deployment based on Salesforce tech is under way in the Americas, she said, with Europe, Asia, and Africa to follow, "demonstrating a methodical, global deployment strategy built on a solid data foundation and clear process mapping."
Kanioura said large language models, while powerful, still lack sustained context, consistency and true agency. Considering the time, cost and talent required to solve those problems, she said PepsiCo decided to "fill those gaps" by building within the Salesforce platform [2], tapping into existing resources such as a semantic layer of software and application programming interfaces.
There is another motivation for companies' speedy adoption that lurks not so far behind all the others: Executives just don't want to wake up behind the curve again. If their sectors are going to be as disrupted as everybody is telling them, this time they want to at least have a hand in events.
Whether 88% of businesses have the experience, tech savvy and imagination to make much of AI in the near term is an open question. Some would say certainly not. And only 5% of the AI adopters in McKinsey's research said they have succeeded in transforming even a single business domain to achieve a measurable bottom-line impact. But businesses remain comfortable embracing AI, according to Alexander Sukharevsky, McKinsey senior partner and global leader of QuantumBlack, McKinsey's AI arm.
Executives acknowledge the risks and limits of AI. They just see them as management challenges. The existential danger, to them, now lies in the failure to adapt.” [3]
1. Efficiency and effectiveness, while often used together, represent distinct concepts. Efficiency focuses on doing things right, minimizing waste and maximizing output with available resources. Effectiveness, on the other hand, focuses on doing the right things, ensuring that goals are achieved and desired outcomes are reached.
What is the Difference Between Efficiency and Effectiveness?
Efficiency:
Minimizing waste:
Efficient processes use resources like time, money, and materials effectively, reducing or eliminating waste.
Optimizing resources:
Efficiency involves making the most of available resources to achieve a task.
Focus on the means:
Efficiency is about how work is done.
Example:
A manufacturing plant that reduces waste material and shortens production time is becoming more efficient.
Effectiveness:
Achieving goals: Effectiveness is about achieving the desired outcome or result.
Focus on the end: Effectiveness is about what is achieved.
Prioritizing the right tasks: Effective individuals and organizations focus on tasks that directly contribute to their goals.
Example: A marketing campaign that successfully increases brand awareness and sales is effective.
In essence:
Efficiency: is about doing something with the least amount of effort, cost, or waste.
Effectiveness: is about achieving the desired result or outcome.
Ideally, organizations should strive for both efficiency and effectiveness to optimize their operations and achieve their goals.
2. Salesforce is a cloud-based software company that specializes in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and related business applications. It offers a suite of tools and services designed to help businesses manage customer interactions, streamline sales processes, automate marketing campaigns, and improve overall customer experience. In essence, Salesforce provides a platform for businesses to connect with customers, manage data, and drive growth.
Here's a more detailed breakdown:
Core Functionality:
CRM:
Salesforce is primarily known for its CRM platform, which helps businesses manage customer data, track interactions, and build stronger relationships.
Sales Cloud:
This module focuses on sales force automation, lead management, opportunity tracking, and sales forecasting.
Service Cloud:
This module helps businesses manage customer service and support, including case management, knowledge bases, and self-service portals.
Marketing Cloud:
This module enables businesses to create and manage marketing campaigns, automate email marketing, and personalize customer journeys.
Commerce Cloud:
This module helps businesses build and manage e-commerce websites and online stores.
Salesforce Platform:
This is a broader platform that allows developers to build custom applications and integrations on top of Salesforce, extending its functionality.
Einstein AI:
Salesforce utilizes AI, known as Einstein, to provide insights, automate tasks, and personalize customer experiences.
Key Benefits:
Improved Customer Relationships:
Salesforce helps businesses understand their customers better, personalize interactions, and build stronger, more lasting relationships.
Increased Sales:
By streamlining sales processes, improving lead management, and providing better tools for sales teams, Salesforce can help businesses close more deals and increase revenue.
Enhanced Productivity:
Salesforce provides tools that automate tasks, improve collaboration, and provide a single source of truth for customer data, leading to increased productivity for employees.
Data-Driven Decisions:
Salesforce offers tools for data analysis and reporting, enabling businesses to make more informed decisions based on data insights.
Scalability and Flexibility:
Salesforce is a cloud-based platform, meaning it can scale to meet the needs of businesses of all sizes and adapt to changing business requirements.
3. Companies Embrace AI More Speedily Than They Did Other Tech Innovations. Rosenbush, Steven. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 20 June 2025: B4.
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