Govern what you Grow

Walk into most large CPG organizations today and you will find AI everywhere. A demand forecasting pilot in supply chain. A content generation tool in marketing. A pricing agent someone built over a weekend. A handful of ChatGPT wrappers nobody officially sanctioned. Everyone experimenting. Nobody coordinating.

It looks like momentum. It isn’t.

A Global Director of Marketing and Commercial Intelligence describes the pattern clearly: the same proof of concept gets built independently across multiple business units, each team convinced they are breaking new ground, none of them aware the work is being duplicated three floors away. The result is wasted investment, fragmented outputs, and no clear path to scale for any of it.

A senior Global Technology Executive at a major CPG company calls this the “foam problem.” Waves of agents and experiments get stood up in rapid succession. Each one produces something. None of them converge. The organization accumulates activity without accumulating capability.

The missing ingredient in both cases is the same: a governance structure that decides what gets built, what gets stopped, and what gets scaled. Not a committee that slows things down. A function that makes sure the right experiments survive and the duplicative ones don’t consume budget that could compound elsewhere.

The Global Director’s organization responded by standing up a screening and prioritization process specifically designed to eliminate duplicate POCs before they start. The question is no longer just whether an idea is good. It’s whether it fits a defined outcome, whether it can scale, and whether someone else in the organization is already building it.

Uncoordinated AI experimentation feels like innovation. In practice it is the most expensive way to stand still.