AI-Spin at Pepsi

If we call it AI, will it increase our stock price?

Reminder: I am on vacation this week, and will not respond to email replies or comments. Any posts are over-flow from last week’s news.

Right now AI is both a very real technology that is poised to change the world as we know it, AND a the latest trend that everyone wants to jump on.

The latest example of the latter is Pepsi. From Axios:

If your local grocery or corner mart is keeping Diet Pepsi, Gatorade or Fritos in stock, you may be able to thank artificial intelligence… PepsiCo, the multinational maker of name-brand soda, chips and sports drinks, may not be a technology company, but it has gone all-in on AI in the past few years, spending "hundreds of millions" of dollars to do so, Athina Kanioura, the company's chief strategy and transformation officer, told Axios…

How it works: Some of PepsiCo's uses of AI include helping create new product lines and flavors, determining which stores are selling the most of which products and getting new stock out, analyzing sales and optimizing product placement and visibility… It's also being used in research and development, for enhancing safety at warehouses, and for sustainability.

I guess you could call using a computer to help manage out-of-stocks is “AI”, but it is the type of AI that Walmart has been using since the 1970s. This is very different from “Generative AI” and large language models that are about to change how business is conducted, but that did not stop Pepsi’s stock price from popping 1.5% on Wednesday with the “news”.

This is the type of “AI impact” that Mark Ritson thinks companies should focus on: Take stuff you were doing anyway, call it AI, and use it to get a bigger budget for your pet project, and maybe some nice public relations buzz. See last week’s post on the subject.

This is also the type of behavior I put in the “Marketing BS” bucket. This is what marketers do when they run out of ideas. They want something big to talk about instead of focusing on the basics — where most of the impact is going to come from.

If you are a “BS marketer” then you see AI as just another tool to grow your team, your budget or your prestige. Hopefully Marketing BS readers know it is far more than that.

Keep it simple,

Edward