PepsiCo: Five lessons on rolling out a complex, multi-year project in a huge organisation

Sam Peña-Taylor

PepsiCo, the global food and beverage giant, implemented an insights automation platform, Ada, over the course of three years, picking up crucial lessons for marketers and researchers tasked with steering vast projects through to completion.

Kate Schardt, Senior Director of Ada, the insight platform that powers the food, snack and beverage firm PepsiCo, is clear on one thing: applying technology that will automate an efficient operation will magnify efficiency. Applying automation to inefficient methods, meanwhile, will only magnify inefficiency.

Technology, then, is only an amplifier of underlying human processes, Schardt told the MRS Impact conference (March 2021). 

PepsiCo’s Ada was a project that the food and beverage titan kicked off three years ago, following a change of leadership that, as ever, wanted things to move faster. This initiated the process of building a tool that...

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