Nestlé is embedding AI into its advertising and gross sales operations, reshaping how groups plan campaigns and handle workflows. The corporate is rebuilding the infrastructure beneath its advertising techniques to assist synthetic intelligence.
Over the previous 12 months, Nestlé has taken steps to organize its international groups to make use of AI in routine, revenue-related duties and artistic manufacturing. The change gives a case research in how massive manufacturers are approaching AI in advertising and e-commerce.
An AI basis for advertising operations
Nestlé lately accomplished the primary part of a worldwide improve to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Personal Version, its core system for dealing with operations in finance, gross sales, and extra. The rollout coated greater than 50,000 customers in 112 nations, and the broader deployment is anticipated to complete over the following two years.
The improve provides groups a single, shared knowledge platform that may serve AI instruments. The brand new system embeds SAP’s AI copilot immediately into core enterprise techniques, which may also help staff pull insights and automate routine duties in ways in which had been tougher to do earlier than.
This will change what’s attainable in a digital-first advertising and gross sales context. In response to Nestlé’s IT management, the improve ought to assist the corporate construct platforms to assist digital advertising and gross sales actions that span geographies and channels.
In different phrases, the work is about making the information and workflows behind advertising and commerce prepared for AI-driven talents, like automated evaluation and execution.
AI-driven content material and digital twins
One of many extra tangible advertising tech advances at Nestlé lies in content material creation. In 2025, Nestlé rolled out an AI-powered content material service that makes use of digital twins (detailed digital 3D fashions of actual merchandise) to generate product visuals for e-commerce and digital media.
Digital twins are created utilizing instruments like NVIDIA Omniverse and OpenUSD, which let the corporate’s groups construct digital replicas of bodily merchandise. A product twin might be tailored in some ways: packaging variants, localised photographs, backgrounds or lighting that match marketing campaign wants, with out bodily images.
Nestlé says the service helps manufacturers like Purina, Nescafé Dolce Gusto, and Nespresso by giving advertising groups the power to supply photographs quicker and at decrease price.
As a substitute of planning dozens of separate photoshoots, groups can produce and adapt belongings in a digital surroundings that displays the actual product. That may pace up campaigns and let advertising groups act nearer to the second when developments or seasonal occasions come up.
At first look, ERP upgrades and digital twins may sound like inner tech discuss. However the implications stretch into how manufacturers plan and ship advertising content material.
Right here’s how:
1. Quicker content material manufacturing
With fashions that may be reused and tailored, groups don’t want to begin from scratch for each marketing campaign or variation, helpful if manufacturers promote in lots of markets and wish tailor-made visuals for native audiences.
2. Decrease prices over time
Conventional inventive work: photoshoots, retouching, enhancing for format variants, might be costly and sluggish. Digital twins convert that work right into a reusable asset. Groups can produce visuals in numerous sizes or contexts with out repeating pricey manufacturing phases.
3. Information-ready advertising workflows
The corporate’s SAP improve was vital as knowledge driving campaigns and buyer interactions sits on a standard platform. That makes it simpler to use AI in features that matter to advertising, from buyer behaviour evaluation to stock insights that inform promotional timing.
4. Automation for routine work
Instruments like SAP’s AI copilot may also help staff end routine duties quicker. In advertising or gross sales operations, that would imply much less time spent pulling experiences or updating marketing campaign plans by hand, and extra time centered on technique or inventive selections.
What advertising leaders can be taught from Nestlé’s AI technique
Nestlé’s strikes present what massive manufacturers are doing to make AI helpful past pilot initiatives: repair the information basis first, then construct instruments that combine into on a regular basis work. For advertising leaders evaluating AI funding, this gives two classes:
- Begin with shared knowledge and workflows that assist a number of groups. AI can solely be helpful if everyone seems to be accessing a constant supply of fact.
- Take into consideration content material as a platform asset. Digital twins make inventive reuse simpler.
What Nestlé is making advertising operations extra predictable and versatile; an method that many massive manufacturers could quickly have to match if they need AI to do greater than remedy slim duties.
(Picture by inma santiago)
See additionally: Walmart expands Scintilla In-Retailer to hyperlink retailer knowledge and advertising
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