A company-wide AI rollout for a consumer packaged goods brand: training, policy, a roadmap, and the first automations.
A consumer packaged goods brand sold across Canada and the US, through grocery retail, the natural channel, online marketplaces, and its own store, with products made in house. Finance and leadership wanted the whole company using AI, well governed, with the years of data sitting in their ERP finally put to work. North Group is currently their ongoing AI partner.
Five years of orders sat in an ERP nobody liked and nothing could sync with. Two reporting tools, built by an outside consultancy, produced two reports. Everything else moved through spreadsheets and hand-keying: orders entered from morning till night, vendors set up field by field, hundreds of work orders closed by hand each month, cycle-count files built nightly, payments posted one at a time. Five departments, independently, asked for a live dashboard.
AI use was individual and conversational: free accounts, no guidelines, no training, and no connection to the tools that hold the work. Some staff used it every day. Some had never touched it. The daily sales report was five or six reports pulled together in a spreadsheet by one person each morning, and it did not go out if he was away.
If I wasn't here today, that report did not get out.
A senior finance manager, on the daily sales report
A sixty-day brief, then discovery: an all-hands, department kickoffs, and individual interviews with nearly everyone in the office, from the group accountant to the warehouse manager.
A half-day in-person workshop for the office team on a shared team plan, then a second in-person session on connectors, scheduled automations, and skills, with one automation built live in the room. Smaller sessions followed for finance, fulfillment, and quality, including people who had never used AI before.
A workflow map of how information moves through the company, role by role, a two-paths memo on the ERP question, and a six-month roadmap of automations, sequenced and approved by leadership with the executive dashboard pulled forward into month one.
Governance to hold it: an AI use policy and an AI-in-hiring policy, red-teamed before they went to the people and culture lead, a team AI plan with spend managed by finance, and an HR policy assistant built and tested for the company's chat workspace.
The first automations: a creative-review skill for marketing that checks every piece against the brand guidelines, and a due-date follow-up automation, both backtested before handover. The review skill caught fourteen of fifteen planted faults blind.
An office team on one AI plan, trained in person twice and then department by department, with a written policy behind it and a roadmap leadership signed off without reprioritizing. The executive dashboard the CEO asked for is in the client's hands as a working prototype, with the data layer beneath it designed.
Marketing has a reviewer that checks creative against the brand guidelines before it ships, and the brand manager built her own scheduled task that reads her email and messages every morning and posts her a plan for the day. Finance manages AI spend by seat. New hires get an AI onboarding as part of starting. And the people who had never used AI are on the same tools as the super users, with the first automations in their hands.
for my purposes (the newbie to AI) this was greatly informative and looking forward to getting connected and starting to use Claude
Running a food, beverage or consumer brand? North Group is the AI department for CPG brands.
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