As one of the biggest names in the food and beverage industry, PepsiCo Inc.’s snacks and drinks are enjoyed over one billion times each day across 200 countries. The complexity of running a business of that size requires a finely tuned balance between delivery logistics, store sales, customer engagement and new product launches.

PepsiCo’s Dave Dohnalik and Johannes Evenblij Garza, speak with theCUBE about AI and customer engagement at Dreamforce.

How does AI fit into this picture? A partnership between PepsiCo and Salesforce Inc. to deploy Agentforce, enhancing field operations and strengthening customer relationships provides answers.

“We have more than six million customers who, every week, deal with billions of consumers and, more and more, everybody wants a personalized experience,” said Johannes Evenblij Garza (pictured, right), senior vice president of global sales and marketing transformation at PepsiCo. “Managing this very complex system requires a back office that can have that information readily available so that we can provide great service to our customers. That’s exactly what we are doing now. We’re consolidating all the data into this new ecosystem.”

Garza spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and George Gilbert at Dreamforce, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Dave Dohnalik (left), senior vice president of technology strategy and enterprise products at PepsiCo, as they discussed how Agentforce has helped PepsiCo reshape its customer relationships. (* Disclosure below.)

New perspectives for customer engagement

PepsiCo announced its plans to deploy Salesforce’s agentic AI platform in June, with the stated goal of unifying data from any source and providing deeper insights into customer behaviors and preferences. Agents have been able to facilitate new perspectives inside the food and beverage giant in how to enable better decision-making and efficiency.

“The unlock we’ve seen is this idea of agents working in conjunction with our human workforce to really uncover some insights maybe they weren’t seeing in the data,” Dohnalik said. “It’s how you unlock that with Agentforce and really bring that dynamic, more proactive interaction, not only for our internal employees from a contact center perspective but also directly with the customers.”

PepsiCo has been able to leverage Agentforce and drive engagement with customers by providing insight in how various products are performing in their inventory. This has also resonated well with PepsiCo’s sales team as well, according to Garza.

“Our own frontline people … typically they go to 15, 20 stores a day,” he explained. “They really don’t have time to understand, ‘Hey, what do you need, customer?’ Now they go and they can see in a mobile app digested brief on exactly what is needed and then they talk and they can discuss it in just a couple of minutes with the customer. It works really well.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Dreamforce:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dreamforce. Neither Salesforce, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE