麦肯锡-财富还是虚构？CPG数字化和人工智能转型的真正价值（英）

October 2024Consumer Packaged Goods PracticeFortune or fiction? The real value of a digital and AI transformation in CPGA new McKinsey analysis quantifies the impact that digital and AI can have on consumer goods businesses and where consumer-packaged-goods executives should focus their efforts.This article is a collaborative effort by Jessica Moulton, Rob Cain, and Roger Roberts, with Hannah Mayer and Spurthi Gummadala, representing views from McKinsey’s Digital and Consumer Packaged Goods Practices.The narrative surrounding generative AI (gen AI), a moon shot, once-in-a-generation innovation, is that it could utterly reinvent how businesses—consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) companies among them—are run.CPG leaders are heeding the call. In a 2024 survey of CPG leaders,1 71 percent said they adopted AI in at least one business function of their organizations (up from 42 percent in 2023), while 56 percent said they were regularly using gen AI.However, no CPG player has truly scaled its gen AI and traditional AI capabilities. So far, CPG leaders have reported adopting gen AI at a lower rate than other industries, such as advanced industries or technology, media, and telecommunications. This may be because leaders lack answers to questions such as, “How much value will AI eventually create in CPG?” and “Where in the value chain will the value be concentrated?”We sought fact-based answers to these questions to help CPGs figure out where to focus and how fast to move.We found that the highest-impact investment areas vary, depending on which subsector a CPG company plays in. Our findings can help CPG leaders determine their next moves in digital and AI (outlined in our article, “What it takes to rewire a CPG company to outcompete in digital and AI”).Quantifying the effects across the CPG value chainAfter conducting a rigorous company-specific quantitative analysis of more than 140 use cases and dozens of expert interviews (see sidebar, “About the research”), we have aggregated subsector-specific estimates to determine the value that CPG companies in the three major subsectors—food and beverage, personal care and home, and beauty—can generate by committing to digital and AI investments. (In this article, “digital and AI” refers to all use cases across digital, analytics, machine learning, traditional AI, and generative AI.) We quantified the value at stake in the main parts of the CPG value chain: the core functions (including back-office support functions) and six innovation zones, as shown in Exhibit 1. Together, the core functions and the innovation zones make up a CPG company’s seven major value streams.Enterprise and support functions, such as human resources and finance departments, will surely benefit from the use of new digital tools, and partnerships and an ecosystem strategy can enable a CPG company to thrive (they can do this in collaboration with suppliers and channel partners). 1 McKinsey Global Survey on AI, February 22–March 5, 202