PepsiCo’s refreshing take on AI to fuel global growth

PepsiCo, the multinational food and beverage company comprised of dozens of household brands, is in a constant state of transformation as business goals and technology capabilities intertwine. With a clear focus on getting the best out of both is Karthik Sankaran, the company’s VP of technology for global sales transformation. Of course, each part is only achievable if the latter is seamlessly in tune with the former, and to achieve that, many moving parts have to run smoothly. Parts comprise one thing, but people, he says, are the foundation to measurable success.

“The primary challenge is user adoption of technology,” says Sankaran. “People get used to certain ways and when we introduce a lot of new technologies into the mix, we have to make sure that user adoption is easy.”

If not done correctly, change management, with all its best intentions, can actually become the primary inhibitor of change. After all, adjustments to business processes, however small, can be very difficult for users to take on. But the newer tools at the company’s disposal are helping significantly.

“I’m seeing more business users than people just coming up with ideas on paper,” he says. “Now they’re actually able to produce things, real working prototypes, because a lot of AI tools now allow you to create full working applications even if they’re not ready for production.”

With these capabilities, Sankaran sees how such tools show the quick and steep potential to visualize what can eventually become fully formed. “People can experiment on their own before coming to the table to say how a concept can be turned into product.”

Sankaran also details further strategies to scale teams and drive innovation. Watch the full video below for more insights, and be sure to subscribe to the monthly Center Stage newsletter by clicking here.

On what drives digital transformation: Over the past few years, we’ve been working on major sales transformation initiatives for North America, which have completely changed the technology landscape for both PepsiCo Foods North America and PepsiCo Beverages North America. So what I’m tackling now is how to take these large North American initiatives and expand them globally. And AI has been a big help. We’ve been leveraging a lot of the latest AI technologies, particularly in the area of coding, as well as several other tools that have tremendously helped us with development. As we try to globalize the tech stack that was built for North America, cost is a primary challenge we’re trying to address with technology, but we’re also working with AI in several other business functions. Another thing we’ve done is give more options to our developers. Every week we’re experimenting with a newer tool. What that’s done is cut down project timelines from several months to a few weeks, and it’s improving every day. I’d say on average, we’re saving up to 30% of development time. So just coding time alone has been halved at least in many cases, so it’s been a massive boost for productivity.

On global perspectives: North America is a data rich country, and we have the willingness to spend a lot to support users here. But in the rest of the world, we’re trying to be more in the self-service mode, so the spend is less. Therefore, we need to rewire our technology in order for it to be supported at a much lower cost. We’re essentially using AI to remove the cost structure out, and for that, we’re rewriting a wide range of technologies. For example, in the US, we use a lot of Apple ecosystem, iOS, Swift software, and those types of things. But in other countries, we have to go to Android. It’s an expensive conversion because we had to rewrite the entire stack. With AI, though, we’re finding that we can do it much faster and cheaper.

On change management: We try to make it easy for users to adopt the technology we’re implementing, and that’s something AI is helping us with. So rather than having to employ a lot of people to aid in change management and transformation, we use AI so adoption becomes easier. We used to have only web as the user interface, but now we have other options like chat and agentic interfaces, as well as other things coming into play to help us. We also encourage a lot of experimentation. So one of the big changes now with AI and other coding tools is that experimentation has become a lot cheaper. Now we’re able to do a lot more quick experiments, fail fast, learn from it, and then refine solutions. So that’s helping us with innovation a lot more.

On emerging trends: One that is exciting is the IT/OT convergence. And we’re also starting to use a lot of IoT technologies in the field and in our warehouses, like in shipping and retail, where we can track equipment in store and look for promotional opportunities. Another very interesting development is ambient IoT, which is IoT that uses batteryless technologies for sensors and other things.In fact, we’ve recently formed an Ambient IoT alliance, partnering with several other manufacturers in this space. So there are lots of these types of newer technologies that are exciting.