THE AI INTERVIEW

The tool brings together more than 40 internal and external data sources, giving product teams faster access to consumer and market intelligence.

“ It provides access to insights 70 % faster and helps us create product concepts that are testing twice as well as before,” Bastien adds.“ When deployed at scale, results like this deliver a clear and measurable return on investment.”

The SLM shift Debate is growing around whether general-purpose LLMs will eventually give way to smaller, more specialised alternatives. Bastien outlines a nuanced picture shaped by industry context and use-case specificity, where certain sectors gravitate towards highly-specialised small language models( SLMs).

“ Some industries – like insurance, banking and pharma – will probably benefit from SLMs because their work relies on deep, domain-specific knowledge,” he says.“ For many other sectors, the real value will come from taking strong general models and continuously refining them with context, data and use-case-specific tuning.”

The trajectory, in Bastien’ s view, points towards AI that acts less like a chatbot and more like a genuine operational partner:“ Purpose-designed solutions – often fine-tuned with a company’ s data, creative standards, regulatory needs and processes – allow AI to shift from being a chatbot to becoming a true agentic partner.”

MARKETERS BENEFITTED FROM RECKITT’ S INITIAL AI ROLLOUT

Balancing innovation with privacy and security As AI becomes embedded in core business processes, the question of data governance becomes increasingly urgent. For Bastien, the answer lies in applying the same rigour to AI that responsible companies already apply to data more broadly.

“ Enterprise-grade AI requires and benefits from the same standards of privacy and security that already govern how companies handle data,” he says.“ Our models and data operate in secure environments and we are very selective about any third-party APIs or external solutions we use.”

Reckitt has invested in guardrails, observability tools and a robust responsible AI assessment process for every application it deploys. The firm has also developed its own responsible AI principles alongside consumer and data governance frameworks. One area demanding fresh thinking is unstructured data – the documents, conversations and institutional knowledge that Gen AI can unlock but that traditional governance frameworks were not designed to manage.

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