The work highlights P&G’s innovative experimentation mindset with a business focus. The power of the disruptive scientific ideas the Labs brought to the table, combined with P&G’s willingness to apply them to real-world challenges and data, meant we could bridge the gap between research and experimentation and commercialization in the CPG sector.
It also shows the power of creativity in tackling challenges, enabling P&G employees to narrow the relevant search space quickly, rather than having to manually find and consider thousands of possible formulation combinations. This can be a time-consuming task, especially when it involves tweaking an existing product formulation, for instance, to find a replacement ingredient because the existing one has become too expensive. With AI as a teammate, formulation professionals can unleash their creativity in new and unexpected ways, as well as spend more time working on strategic, value-added activities like new product development.
P&G further enhanced its skills in applying leading-edge AI techniques to product development. Building on P&G’s existing AI capabilities, we expanded the company’s expertise to human-AI collaboration so it can now get the best from its people and capabilities in a new, collaborative way.
Our collaborative research approach—working across disciplines and domains—gave P&G a framework and iterative methods to get real, new value from their innovation processes. These capabilities can be used to foster Human + Machine collaboration in other areas, such as operations. P&G is now exploring how these approaches could make an impact across the organization.