PepsiCo’s Analytics Transformation: From Manual Reports to AI-Driven Consumer Insights

What if knowing a customer’s favorite Mountain Dew flavor could unlock insights into their snack preferences, like whether they’re likely to reach for a bag of Lay’s BBQ chips? Or maybe they’re more of a sour cream and onion kind of person?

That’s exactly the kind of question (and way more) PepsiCo is easily exploring with the help of AI-powered analytics.

By eliminating siloed data and time-consuming reporting processes, PepsiCo’s teams were able to shift their focus from building reports to analyzing behaviors that help shape smarter business strategies, thanks to the deeper insights enabled by AI analytics. For organizations aiming to refine their data strategy and become truly data-driven, AI tools like Tellius can be transformative, enabling smarter and faster operations through the power of innovation and analytics.

So, how did the magic happen for PepsiCo?

In a recent webinar with Tellius, Amber Martin, PepsiCo’s Manager of Reporting and Insights for Global CX, discussed the company’s evolving analytics strategy, highlighting PepsiCo’s use of AI-driven analytics to speed up decision-making, predict trends, and create more personalized consumer experiences. Here’s a look at how Tellius is helping the consumer goods giant unlock the full potential of their data.

Written by: Betsy Lillian,

Content Marketing Manager at Tellius

Tackling data complexity to uncover timely consumer insights

PepsiCo—the global food, snack, and beverage company whose brands include household names like Lay’s, Gatorade, Tostitos, Mountain Dew, Tropicana, Quaker, and so many more—unsurprisingly gathers a massive amount of data. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of internal and external data sources, spanning sales, marketing, consumer interactions, and supply chain operations.

Regarding just “day-to-day consumer experience data,” Amber said, PepsiCo annually receives about 1 million contacts per year, in addition to more than 1 million consumers who search the company’s product locator across all of its brands.

But teams were struggling with manual reporting processes, making it difficult to gather timely and relevant consumer insights to create consumable, easily shareable reports.

“What we really were missing was an efficient way to integrate all of these data points that we had into one holistic view of the consumer journey,” Amber explained.

Their existing approach using PowerBI faced several limitations: 

• Teams didn’t have enough control over the types of data they needed to investigate.
• Reports were taking days (or sometimes weeks) to generate, creating bottlenecks.
• Teams outside of Power BI (i.e., those without licenses to the platform) lacked access to reports.

“We were very limited in our ability to scale our insights across the multiple teams that we work with who didn’t have access,” Amber explained.

Streamlining data and reporting with AI-driven analytics

This is where Tellius entered the picture, providing a way to streamline data integration and report generation through:

• AI-assisted reports: Teams have immediate access to interactive dashboards and reports based on the combination of all of those many data sources.
• Unlimited drilling and sharing: With one click, teams can share embedded, fully drillable views and scorecards from Tellius to other departments (without license restrictions).
• Natural language ease and self-service analytics: Instead of dealing with building reports in Power BI, anyone can quickly uncover near real-time insights in Tellius by asking their own questions with a Google-like search.

“With Tellius, not only were we able to streamline the creation of our reports by integrating those multiple data sources into this one platform,” Amber explained, “but we were also able to make it easier for different departments to view these insights via embedded links through Tellius. Even if they’re not a Tellius user, they can still see these reports and use the filtering functions available.”

Boosting business-wide impacts with live dashboards and proactive insights

In addition to improving the speed and ease of reporting, Tellius is enabling more collaboration across the organization, guiding decisions in areas like supply chain management, marketing, and customer engagement.

“This value of switching to Tellius has been profound across our business,” Amber said. “We’ve become a source of answers for critical consumer questions from other departments.”

For example, Tellius’ live dashboards enable teams to instantly monitor what’s happening across product lines and regions, ensuring they don’t have to wait for reports to come back days or weeks later. Marketing stakeholders, for example, can monitor product launches or promotions in near real time, giving them insights into how consumers respond to certain products, promotions, or marketing messages. 

“Using AI-powered analytics, we’re able to process these millions of rows of data in a fraction of the time it used to take us,” Amber said. “The product locator data used to be a huge challenge for us. Now, we can quickly go in and analyze where consumers are searching for a specific Mountain Dew flavor, for example. We can identify those gaps in supply and use that information to help guide our marketing and supply chain teams.”

Furthermore, Tellius has empowered PepsiCo to go beyond merely reporting on past data trends to actually predicting future consumer behaviors. This shift has made it easier for PepsiCo to manage their inventory, optimize product placement, and anticipate consumer needs.

For example:

• Supply chain improvements: By analyzing product locator data, PepsiCo can quickly pinpoint where specific products might be running low. Then, they can manage inventory and address supply gaps.
• Predictive modeling for marketing: AI-powered insights reveal which products consumers are likely to buy together, helping PepsiCo refine promotions and improve cross-selling (in near real time). 

Amber also shared how the use of predictive analytics in Tellius is helping PepsiCo be more forward-thinking:

“We’re not just reacting to what happened—we can predict what might happen next. So, we can start to understand the personas behind these purchases. We can start to tailor our marketing efforts and even improve product availability based on predicted demand. Understanding not just the ‘what,’ but the ‘why’ behind consumer behaviors is key to helping us shape our strategies.”

Democratizing data access through customized, self-service reporting

One of the biggest transformations for PepsiCo, according to Amber, has been the shift from a rigid BI model, where only certain teams could access reports, to a more customized, self-service approach.

With Tellius’ natural language interface and baked-in explainability charts, PepsiCo’s non-technical users can now directly query their data and get answers—without needing to involve an analyst. For instance, teams can now perform sophisticated basket analysis on their own, understanding product associations and optimizing strategies across categories, simply by asking a question in natural language.

“Before, we had a hard time dedicating our resources to these larger analyses, like basket analysis, because it required so much manual manipulation,” Amber said. “And now, we can utilize the Tellus platform to do that heavy lifting for us.”

Importantly, customized dashboards also ensure that stakeholders across regions have access to the insights that are the most relevant to them.

“You could have one marketer who is focused on the northern region, and they have a dashboard for that. Or, you could have another marketer in the eastern region, and they have a separate dashboard for their location,” Amber explained. “The sky’s the limit.”

Looking forward: AI agents and advanced analytics

So, what’s next?

Amber shared PepsiCo’s plans to leverage more advanced capabilities in AI and machine learning within Tellius, including:

• Sentiment analysis: Analyzing those million-plus consumer contacts per year to better understand consumer feedback.
• Coupon effectiveness analysis: Gaining insights into how, when, and why consumers redeem coupons to refine future promotions.
• Product feedback tracking: Monitoring daily product feedback and tracking trends in consumer reactions to optimize support and product improvement.

“The heart of consumer experience analysis for us is to be that innovation hub for the business,” Amber said. “We’re the ones who hear directly from the consumers, and if we can get to that future, it will be helping so many parts of the PepsiCo business to achieve our overarching goal of improving the consumer experience in all of these cases.”

Amber sees AI agents as another future opportunity that could take PepsiCo’s data-driven decision-making even further: e.g., providing deeper insights by conducting multi-step analyses, identifying new growth areas, and recommending the best strategies. 

“I can imagine in our basket analysis use case if I could just simply ask, ‘Where are the unseen opportunities for Brand X to grow,’ and an AI agent can go beyond the simple kind of chat bots that we have now,” she said.

Driving adoption through change management

PepsiCo’s journey to implementing Tellius was carefully managed to ensure that teams across the organization could comfortably start leveraging the platform for deeper insights.

Specifically, Amber highlighted PepsiCo’s focus on cross-functional training and internal advocacy:

• Hands-on training workshops and tailored learning paths helped teams maximize their use of the platform.
• Internal data champions in each department helped onboard peers and acted as advocates for Tellius’ capabilities.
• By aligning departmental KPIs with analytics goals, PepsiCo demonstrated how the platform’s capabilities would directly impact performance outcomes.
  

“I wanted to make sure our colleagues and our stakeholders felt empowered,” she noted.

Building a smarter, faster future with AI analytics

PepsiCo’s journey with Tellius underscores how AI analytics can not only transform tedious reporting workflows, but also enable teams to improve collaboration, more efficiently analyze consumer behavior, and make forward-thinking decisions to effect change across the business.

“For any organization looking to streamline their data strategy and become data-driven, tools like Tellius can make all the difference,” Amber said. “We’re seeing firsthand how innovation and analytics can create a smarter, faster organization.”

If you’re ready to learn how Tellius can empower your organization to leverage AI-driven insights like it did for PepsiCo, reach out today for a personalized demo.