Sarah Tyler

When I first encountered the promise of artificial intelligence in trade promotion planning, I was skeptical. After fifteen years managing category strategies and trade spend for a major CPG portfolio, I'd seen plenty of technology platforms over-promise and under-deliver. Yet the persistent challenge remained: our trade promotion budgets consumed 20-25% of gross revenue, and we could confidently attribute positive ROI to less than half of our promotional investments. The margin pressure from private labels, coupled with retailers demanding more sophisticated activation strategies, meant we couldn't continue managing promotions with spreadsheets and gut instinct. What followed was a three-year journey implementing AI-powered promotion optimization that fundamentally changed how our organization approaches trade spending—and taught me lessons I wish I'd known from day one. The turning point came during a particularly brutal quarterly review when our VP of Sales demanded to k...

After fifteen years managing trade promotion programs for a multinational CPG company, I thought I had seen every challenge the industry could throw at me. Late nights reconciling promotion ROI spreadsheets, tense category review meetings where we defended our trade spend allocation decisions with incomplete data, and the perpetual struggle to forecast promotional lift across hundreds of SKUs and dozens of retail partners. Then our executive team mandated a digital transformation initiative, and my world changed completely. What I learned implementing advanced cloud-based AI systems to manage our trade promotion operations fundamentally altered not just how we work, but what we believed was possible in promotion effectiveness analytics. The journey began when our VP of Sales challenged us to improve our promotional cadence decision-making by thirty percent within eighteen months. Traditional business intelligence tools were not going to cut it. We needed something that could process re...

In the fast-moving consumer goods industry, procurement has evolved from a transactional function into a strategic capability that directly impacts gross margin return on investment and competitive positioning. With mounting pressure to optimize trade spend, improve promotional lift, and enhance supply chain agility, FMCG companies are turning to artificial intelligence to transform how they source, negotiate, and manage supplier relationships. The complexity of managing thousands of SKUs across multiple distribution channels while maintaining velocity and market share demands a procurement approach that goes beyond traditional methods. The transition to AI in Procurement requires careful planning and systematic implementation. Companies like Unilever and Procter & Gamble have demonstrated that success depends not on technology alone, but on a holistic approach that addresses organizational readiness, data infrastructure, process alignment, and stakeholder engagement. This compreh...