TECHNOLOGY

I think it’ s probably fair to say, focusing on category management, that the old way has sort of been left behind for obvious reasons – you know, the new technologies at our disposal. Was there a moment in your career where you thought there has to be a faster, more intelligent way to do this? I started my career in procurement, and part of my role within that organisation was: how can we accelerate our scale? How can we really drive more value through leveraging technology? My specific focus was on category management, and looking at what I’ d say was a very dated process of using a really nice PowerPoint deck that we had built over the years to build category strategies. Ultimately, we found this very small start-up called Sirion that was digitising the process – not only to help us build better category strategies, but to help us as an organisation really standardise and streamline the approach. And just as a user of the tool, I also got to see, wow, this is super powerful. I love where the technology is going, and that’ s actually ultimately what led me to quitting my job, joining Sirion, starting their US company, and really being the first person out there in the market advocating for this change – that there’ s technology out there that can help organisations drive value at scale.

So, one thing I’ m really intrigued by, Andrew, is how we balance the need for global standardisation with the fact that every category behaves so differently. Can AI help bridge that gap? What we’ re able to do with the AI, the technology, and combining it with human intelligence, is drive organisations through a process that delivers standardisation at scale. They’ re inputting information into the tool that’ s specific to them, so the AI, following that framework, can actually make recommendations and give them insights based on the data that they put into the tool. So it’ s always custom and tailored to their specific use case.

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