Driving AI innovation and governance within an FMCG organisation

The work with our customer in the Innovation and Sustainability team saw Project One fulfil the role of Portfolio lead for AI, where we mobilised an AI Acceleration Programme. This programme had three key areas of focus:

Uplift AI governance across the company

Assess and adopt the new wave of GenAI capability to unlock productivity across the business

Review transformational digital AI opportunities across our functions and Business Groups (BG).

The approach has been to learn fast, experiment with speed and create the framework for others to do the same.

To enable our work, we created a Go Wide and Go Deep Framework.

Our Go Wide approach was to harness at speed the value in productivity and other opportunities presented by AI (in particular Gen AI) across our entire employee base. Providing employees with access to new AI tools with guidelines and training on how to use them effectively and responsibly.

There were six major workstreams in Go Wide:

Partners & Architecture

Enterprise Tooling

Upskilling

Legal, Governance & Assurance

Procurement

Communication, which progressed in parallel.

Our Go Deep approach looked to identify and assess the high-impact AI opportunities across the business, those which we believe can create competitive differentiation for our BGs and Functions and/or have a transformative impact on our performance.

This work builds upon the Nutrition Digital and AI strategy (AI for Competitive Advantage), as well as the Functional Digital Transformation work already underway across many Functions (R&D, Marketing, Finance, etc.) to provide a landscape view of the transformational AI initiatives across the company and provide clarity on where and how we should invest in new capability. We believe this was an important step to create a single view of all the AI initiatives across the company to ensure that we optimise our costs and focus on the areas that will have the biggest impact for our customer. To date, we have completed an initial assessment across the business, and this has enabled us to create an initial overview of the current AI landscape.

Alongside our Go Wide, Go Deep framework we structured a governance model which had a weekly AI governance board sponsored by the CIO and CDO, and a quarterly Executive AI Steering group sponsored by a member of the Exec board.

The first AI Exec board was very positive in which they were passionate and committed to lead and steer the direction of the AI strategy and transformation agenda. They were clear that they want to move fast and have a risk/reward framework in place to inform decision making. The Exec board was also clear that we should follow the customer’s governance, rather than a BG by BG approach underpinned by legal guidance and the responsible AI framework.

This led the Exec board to agree to our proposal for a central AI Centre of Excellence (CoE) which will allow us to drive transformational change now and set the customer up for success in the future. The AI CoE will include BGs, Functions, Tech & Data, Legal, Privacy, Ethics, Comms and training. With a view to enable the following:

• Create a central view of the AI landscape to support strategic direction for the business

• Provide a governance and assurance layer for all AI to enable the business to pursue AI apps safely, ethically and responsibly

• Understand and optimise our investment in AI across the business

• Set the business up for pace of change with the right AI architecture

• Cross functional squad of 17 people connected into a developing governance ecosystem underpinned by an AI assurance process

• Bring together the right internal and external expertise to enable better decision making.

It was fantastic to be involved in shaping the Go Wide and Go Deep framework and landing a governance structure around AI as part of the AI Acceleration programme team. Within Go Wide we focused on the Partners and Architecture workstream. Working alongside key Partners like Google to understand their AI roadmaps and look at where to play, experiment and co-create in horizon 2 or horizon 3.

Horizon 2 is new innovation where we explore and discover new expansions and experiment for strategic impact whilst exploring commercial value.

Horizon 3 is next innovation where we create entirely new possibilities by engaging innovation ecosystems to understand and unlock new future opportunities.

From an Architecture perspective, we have been shaping a Go Deep Architecture decision investment framework. Ensuring we have a clear process to prioritise AI demand and ensure alignment to our AI architectural principles, blueprints and technology roadmaps to make informed build vs buy investment decisions.

The Partners and Architecture workstream will now nicely align to the Innovation Operating model which was approved and the 3 core objectives of the model:

Deliver the Technology Point of View on horizon 2-3 technologies, providing thought leadership and direction in the space of emerging technologies

Experimental innovation without the fear of failing via a future-fit agile innovation framework

Build and nurture innovation ecosystems, championing open innovation to bring the outside in and cultivate strong partnerships.