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How Heineken Is Using AI to Redefine Its Growth Strategy
Heineken partnered with BCG for a data and AI makeover that led to transformative growth.
With artificial intelligence at an inflection point, BCG is helping organizations weave together human and technological capabilities to maximize value potential, productivity, and innovation from AI.
Artificial intelligence is evolving at breakneck speed, creating unprecedented opportunities, and challenges, across every industry and function. Companies with higher AI maturity—roughly 25% of companies already leveraging AI—are now scaling the latest technology and further separating themselves from the competition. AI strategy is integral to the success of these AI-mature organizations; over 50% of AI leaders expect more than double their investment return within a year.
When predictive AI is complemented by generative AI, their combined power offers stronger capabilities and greater, sustained AI value creation. Our AI strategy consulting team empowers clients to reach beyond single uses cases and execute a comprehensive AI business transformation. By transforming your business with AI, we work to reimagine processes, foster adoption, and develop the right capabilities, roles, and governance to successfully—and responsibly—deploy AI at scale. For BCG and our clients, the future of AI in business offers both a strategic tool to scale up value and a viable solution to our most pressing global challenges.
Generative AI
The new wave of generative AI systems have the potential to transform entire industries. To be an industry leader of tomorrow, you need a clear and compelling generative AI strategy today.
Responsible AI
Responsible AI isn’t simply a framework to mitigate risk. It’s a way to deliver transformative business impact. BCG works with companies to make responsible AI a reality.
BCG X
Drawing knowledge from over 3,000 of the world’s leading tech experts, BCG X disrupts the present and creates the future by building bold new products, services, and businesses.
Digital, Tech, and Data
BCG identifies and delivers high-impact programs that combine human and technological capabilities—and drive breakthrough innovation.
Business leaders must focus on turning the promise of predictive and generative AI into real, sustained value. Around 70% of all AI transformations fall short of expectations, with executives citing key challenges that range from insufficient data to lack of expertise. Our artificial intelligence consultants treat every AI business transformation as a unique journey, shaped around an organization’s starting point, circumstances, and goals. To successfully deploy AI at scale and capitalize on the impact of AI on business, we prioritize a 10-20-70 approach that emphasizes algorithms (10%), tech and data (20%), and people and processes (70%). With these capabilities in hand, companies are embarking on AI transformation journeys that focus on ambitious targets and superior AI value creation.
Based on our recent global study, 62% of companies recognize AI as a source of value—but only 24% have been able to turn that promise into real value creation. The time to act is now. Companies looking to maximize the benefits of AI in business and their value potential should be experimenting with AI as early as possible, capitalizing on near-term cost management opportunities while building productivity across functions.
Our three interconnected value plays—deploy, reshape, and invent (DRI)—are designed to successfully scale predictive and generative AI and drive end-to-end business transformation. We reinforce DRI execution by strengthening clients’ enterprise foundations—the underlying technology, people, and risk capabilities needed to support such a large-scale transformation effort. Our DRI framework acts as a critical strategic asset for our AI consulting team, guiding clients to long-term competitive advantage through their own data, talent, and culture.
THREE STRATEGIC PLAYS TO MAXIMIZE AI VALUE CREATION
BCG Executive Perspectives 2024
Our new playbooks for future-ready functions are designed to help CEOs and senior executives navigate their AI transformation journeys.
Heineken partnered with BCG for a data and AI makeover that led to transformative growth.
A powerful cost transformation saved a global beverage giant $310M and unlocked $1.1B for future opportunities.
BCG X offers a comprehensive library of products—backed by scientific rigor, extensive IP, and sophisticated AI components—to accelerate AI business transformation in support of our clients’ top objectives.
Supply Chain AI takes a holistic approach to transforming a company’s supply chain, from strategy and design through integrated planning and optimized execution. Backed by a unique set of AI solutions from BCG X, we enhance seven key supply chain capabilities while developing the plans, processes, skills, and culture that fuel and accelerate transformation.
Using holistic, tailored retail intelligence software, our Retail AI technology unlocks critical advantages across the six vital components of the value chain. Establish competitive advantage with Retail AI by ensuring the availability of goods and services, examining customer data, and predicting future behavior.
Auto AI combines business and tech expertise to tackle the challenges of implementing AI in the automotive industry.
Fabriq by BCG speeds marketing transformations by injecting automation, templatization, and precision targeting into existing marketing tech and processes—ultimately both scaling and hyperpersonalizing campaign execution.
Vikas Taneja
BCG is more than just a strategic consultant. Our clients benefit from our global ecosystem of AI and GenAI collaborations, including those with leading tech companies like AWS, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Salesforce, and SAP—and with AI-centered enterprises such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Articul8, LangChain, and Palantir. This ecosystem provides best-in-class GenAI enablement and transformation through an end-to-end approach that ensures our clients’ ability to maximize their investments and stay ahead of the competition.
Working together, we are able to deliver unprecedented value across four critical transformation pillars: optimizing existing technology, reshaping business functions, inventing new business opportunities, and reimagining entire organizations. And with BCG X, our in-house design-and-build capability, we also remain at the forefront of technology, offering practical solutions to companies that seek to transform their business with AI and develop customized, industrial-grade platforms for high-value use cases.
BCG was named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Business Consulting Services 2024, an in-depth report evaluating 18 business consulting services providers against 14 critical criteria.
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Ushering in the future of AI in business, our AI consulting team and industry experts ensure that clients have the full range of expertise to drive end-to-end AI business transformation. Meet some of our AI strategy and AI at scale experts.