India spans 3.3 million kilometres spread over 7,900 towns and around 600,000 villages. It has approximately 10 million retailers. The fast moving sector, which, along with automobile, consumer durables and pharmaceuticals, makes up the majority of the consumer industries (CI) sector, retails products from around 21,000 manufacturers producing a quarter of a million stock keeping units (SKUs) (Nielsen 2016). Add the other sectors, and the CI sector in India sells a million products to a billion Indians. Imagine doing that only with human intelligence.

The path to achieve stability for artificial intelligence (AI)-based implementation in the CI sector is nascent but the potential is becoming increasingly clear. The adoption of AI-based solutions in India has seen an upward trend in the past few years. Over the past few years, it has been observed that high-and mid-cap CI companies have benefitted from AI in their various practice lines. AI has delivered excellent results in terms of increased revenues, improved productivity and increased effectiveness of their promotional expenditures. Companies have seen tremendous changes in their transactional, distribution and marketing-based processes, thereby improving both top-line and bottom-line growth. The reason behind this key success is the ability of these organizations to combine AI-based technology with the human-in-the-loop to deliver efficient business outcomes at scale.

Having operated in the market for over two years, Digilytics AI, a category leader of easy-to-use SaaS AI products, finds that players in the consumer industry are extremely receptive to the use of AI and analytics to gain firstmover advantage. However, only a selected few companies understand the real benefits of AI and how to apply it. Despite a huge growth in the technology infrastructure in these companies, most continue to struggle with basic data quality issues. However, there is a consensus among business heads that there lies a huge potential in using AI and in all the major business functions within the company. With this positivity in the business sphere, companies have initiated the roll out of AI-based capabilities with the right steps in mind.