Mark your calendar for Mediaweek, October 29-30 in New York City. We’ll unpack the biggest shifts shaping the future of media—from tv to retail media to tech—and how marketers can prep to stay ahead. Register with early-bird rates before sale ends!
Heineken is the latest brand getting comfortable with generative AI chatbots.
The brewer has integrated a gen AI chatbot into its cloud platform, KIM (Knowledge and Insights Management), letting Heineken’s global workforce of 2,000 staffers query structured and unstructured data, including over 8,000 files of consumer information, interviews and reports, for real-time insights.
Employees can ask questions such as “How do European millennials feel about non-alcoholic beers?” or “What are consumer motivations for buying cider?” or “What are some trends in sustainable packaging in 2024?”
Enhancing its internal insights platform has cut costs, saving the company couple of hundred thousand Euros, time and resources previously spent on market research and analysis.
“[KIM] is helping us connect the dots,” Heineken’s global head of strategy and insights Lalo Luna told ADWEEK. “It’s helping us be faster in searching and putting real-time analysis at the hands of people, in real-time. Also, the time to market has reduced significantly in the last six months since we began testing with gen AI.”
Heineken isn’t the only alcohol brand using gen AI: Diageo is using it to speed up package design for Smirnoff vodka and Don Julio tequila.
“Conversational interfaces and knowledge discovery are just two areas where gen AI holds immense potential to revolutionize business,” said Gartner vp analyst Nicole Greene. “With its ability to enhance customer interactions and uncover valuable insights, gen AI is poised to make a significant impact, and Heineken’s approach leans into these use cases.”
The multinational beverage company has a market cap of nearly $54 billion and a portfolio of over 170 global beer brands. According to Luna, Heineken’s ultimate strategy is to consolidate global market research onto a single platform, creating a comprehensive one-stop shop for insights.
Eliminating redundancies and costs
Before adopting the conversational tool, which was developed by consumer insights platform Stravito, research reports across various markets were going unused at Heineken.
Implementing this tool has helped the brand consolidate diverse market research and reports previously scattered across various regions within Heineken. Before introducing this AI tool, access to this information was inconsistent across the organization, resulting in potential inefficiencies and wasted resources.
“We were having a lot of duplication of efforts as a result,” said Luna. “Now we’re saving a lot of money just by avoiding duplication of effort.”
Stravito uses OpenAI’s model, bookmarking conversation threads in a History tab so people can revisit and continue previous discussions. The platform automatically generates summaries of key takeaways in bullet points, citing the sources included in the answers.
“AI is a broad space with many different techniques and practices,” said Greene. “We can expect to see alcohol brands continue to use the technology in an effort to gain deeper consumer understanding so that they can deliver more customized products and experiences that reflect changing consumer tastes.”
