AB InBev, the largest producer of beer in the world, has announced a collaboration with DataRobot to use its AI platform. The multinational drink and brewing company based in Leuven, Belgium says that it will use DataRobot’s AI platform to develop AutoML models. These models along with other tools from DataRobot will help the brewer to generate additional revenue in six of its main markets, including the Netherlands.
DataRobot unveiled its DataRobot AI Cloud as a unified environment for building intelligent businesses in September. Now, AB InBev says the AI Cloud platform will help build AutoML models providing insights based on the consumption figures in different markets. These models will then allow AB InBev sales representatives to advise customers on the best products to purchase to grow their sales.
How the platform promotes substantial revenue growth
While AB InBev is officially announcing the use of DataRobot’s AI platform, the brewer says that the platform has already helped with substantial revenue growth during the first half of this year. AB InBev says its data science team already had experience with various AI platforms. However, they struggled with limited scalability of these models and insufficient accuracy and speed. The company says that the quality of the data could not be guaranteed and sales employees were able to share the insights with customers only after 1.5 weeks, the time by which data would be outdated.
With DataRobot, AB InBev says it is able to work faster and better and also expand the availability of AI. “Data science is usually approached very traditionally. The model must be built by people and understandable, otherwise it will not be trusted. In that sense, deploying a new technology like AutoML was a challenge. We really broke through a barrier by choosing DataRobot,” Renato Piai, commercial & consumer analytics director at AB InBev, said in a statement.
With functions like Model Grader, Bias & Fairness Production Monitoring and Continuous AI, Piai says that Ab InBev is able to save millions by preventing wrong sales. With DataRobot’s platform, AB InBev is also able to set up the infrastructure for the most valuable products based on prediction in just nine weeks. The AutoML models from DataRobot enable AB InBev to better predict which products from its expanded range will be most valuable to hospitality businesses.
In a nutshell, the brewer is able to bring all the necessary data from the regions together in one data pipeline and implement the DataRobot platform to design, validate and bring AutoML models into production. DataRobot’s platform allows it to build intelligent business and AB InBev is able to make intelligent product recommendations in several markets using the insights from the AI Cloud platform, leading to a significant increase in sales in the first half of the year. With hospitality slowly returning to pre-pandemic levels, the brewer could realise positive return on investment and further increase its revenue.
“It’s great how AB InBev uses the power of our platform to apply AutoML on a large scale and with a lot of impact,” says Joep Gerrits, Regional Director Benelux at DataRobot. “With the same team, AB InBev has been able to make a significantly greater contribution to business results and show what data science and AI can do, if you have the right people, processes and tools in-house”.
For years, traditional businesses have shied away from adopting the latest technology and AB InBev is not only leading with its AI adoption but also showing how companies can improve their revenue with the adoption of new AI platforms like the one from DataRobot. “At the moment we are already training sales teams in other countries on how to use the dashboard with insights. With DataRobot, we have taken the work that our data scientists did for years on the laptop to the cloud and made it faster and almost infinitely scalable,” Piai adds.