Do large organisations really understand complexity? Or do they underestimate it?

The discussion argues that operations exist to manage organisational complexity but are often overlooked unless disruptions occur, making end-to-end understanding hard in large companies. On AI, it’s described as a buzzword whose operational impact is often oversold: automation isn’t new, and effective AI requires deep process knowledge, high-quality standardised data, documentation, and governance, plus costly model building, training, and controls, making business cases difficult in FMCG operations today; however, AI pressure may accelerate data standards and enable more end-to-end supplier-to-consumer data exchange. For growth strategy, the key operational advice is to start by asking why a “white space” exists, identify execution barriers early, and make explicit trade-offs (e.g., distributor vs creating a legal entity) based on timeline, control, capabilities, and scalability. On barbell portfolios, premium and entry-level require different production, logistics, skills, and standards, risking underutilised assets unless execution is deliberate and guided by a clear playbook. The concluding advice is to involve an operational “buddy” early and stay close to day-to-day operations to sense-check ideas and improve predictability.

00:00 Ops and Complexity Reality

03:49 Why AI Hype Meets Data

11:17 AI Governance and Standards

14:26 Making Growth Plans Executable

26:14 Barbell Strategy and Final Advice

What Is Actually Driving Profitable Growth Today?

Our next executive workshops are designed to answer that question directly.

In a confidential, small-group setting, we combine current research, structured frameworks, and open discussion focused on your specific challenges.

Each one-hour session addresses a single strategic issue — Volume vs. Value, Demand Spaces, Shrinking for Growth — with the aim of moving beyond tactics and clarifying where growth is truly coming from, and where it is not.

Reserve your Spot

Most of what is currently being presented as evidence for the agentic AI revolution in FMCG is vendor marketing dressed as research. Not because the technology has no future. It almost certainly does. But the case for transformation today rests on a body of “evidence” produced almost entirely by the companies selling the tools.

That distinction matters. It should change how you read every report, briefing, and case study landing in your inbox right now.

Your Evidence Source Is Also Your Salesperson

Pick up any serious-looking report on agentic AI in consumer goods. Follow the footnotes. You will find Microsoft blogs, Google case studies, Pactum white papers, and Snowflake posts. These are not independent researchers. These are the infrastructure vendors, the software providers, and the negotiation platform companies with a direct commercial interest in the conclusion.

The financial projections look authoritative. A projected three-year ROI of 124% to 282% for a typical five-billion-dollar enterprise. Between 7.7 and 17.6 million dollars in net present value. Where do these numbers come from? A Microsoft blog post. About Microsoft products.

This is not a minor disclosure issue. It is the whole problem.

The issue is not that these companies fabricate results. The issue is that they select which results to publish. Every vendor has a structural incentive to surface only the wins. There is no mechanism in a company blog post for publishing the pilots that ran for eighteen months and produced nothing. There is no audit trail for the implementations that cost more than they saved. You see the curated set. You do not see the base rate.

When Architecture Fills the Gap Where Outcomes Should Be

When the commercial results are thin, the language shifts. Architecture fills the gap.

L’Oréal’s AI beauty advisor synthesises 150,000 dermatologist annotations. It keeps latency under five seconds. It handled 2,000 simultaneous users in testing. These are real engineering achievements. Not one of them is a business outcome.

Where is the conversion rate data, independently audited? What happened to basket size? What is the repeat purchase rate among users who engaged with the tool versus those who did not? The report does not say. What it offers instead is “up to 4% conversion rate improvement.” That figure is a modelled estimate from the same Microsoft source, not a reported result from L’Oréal’s own investor communications.

Jo Malone’s AI Scent Advisor “recreates the brand’s in-store consultation experience digitally.” Unilever’s Market Insights agent “reduces strategic analysis from hours to seconds.” Nestlé “integrates AI-driven inventory prediction with Coupa.” Every one of these sentences describes what the tool does. None of them tells you what changed commercially as a result.

This is not a minor gap. It is the whole gap.

The pattern is consistent enough to be deliberate. Describe the inputs. Name the technology stack. Reference the scale of data processed. Then assert, rather than demonstrate, that commercial value follows. If you are a CMO or a supply chain director, that assertion is not enough to justify a budget.

The One Number That Should Set Your Standard

The most concrete case study in the current AI-in-FMCG literature involves AB InBev.

AB InBev reportedly runs 30 billion dollars in decisions through AI annually. The specific production deployment covered in detail is an order correction system. When a customer’s order contains an error, the system creates a ticket, contacts the customer to obtain the correction, and closes the ticket without human involvement. It handles roughly 30% of the 20 million annual tickets. The direct annual value created: $ 1.2 million.

AB InBev’s annual revenue is approximately 59 billion dollars. That value figure is roughly 0.002% of revenue. This is useful process automation. It is genuinely operational. It is not a transformation.

The second figure, 310 million dollars in orders delivered 1.5 days faster, sounds more significant. But the report provides no data on what that acceleration actually produced. Were those orders at risk of cancellation without it? Did the 1.5 days change purchasing behaviour downstream? We are not told.

The reason this matters is not to dismiss AB InBev’s work. It matters because if the strongest, most specific case in the literature produces 1.2 million dollars in direct value for a business of that scale, then the 124% to 282% three-year ROI projections require serious scrutiny before anyone acts on them.

The Wrong Question Is Already Everywhere

Every FMCG executive right now is being asked: “How is your organisation preparing for agentic AI?”

Wrong question. Ask instead: “Can you name a specific commercial outcome, a number tied to a quarter, verified by someone other than the vendor, that this technology produced?”

If the answer is no, you are looking at infrastructure investment and institutional anxiety dressed as strategy. That is the Fear vs. Strategy diagnostic playing out in real time. Companies are committing budgets not because they have identified a problem that agentic AI solves better than existing tools. They are committing budgets because they fear being the last one to act.

That is not inherently irrational. Being genuinely late to a technology shift carries real cost. But it is not the same as having evidence. And the two are routinely conflated in briefings designed to generate that exact anxiety.

The Hard Truth

The technology will matter. Possibly more than most operators currently believe. But the gap between what is being claimed today and what is being demonstrated today is substantial. And that gap is not an accident.

The current AI-in-FMCG narrative mirrors what happened with digital transformation in the mid-2010s, and with big data before that. Each cycle produced a wave of projected ROI figures, vendor-sourced case studies, and language about irreversible change. The companies that genuinely benefited did so quietly, years later, after the hype had dissipated and the actual use cases had been sorted from the theatre.

Who, besides the vendor, has independently measured what this produced? If the answer is 'nobody,' you are not reading the evidence. You are reading a forecast with a logo.

Act accordingly.

The J.M. Smucker Company finished its fiscal year ending 30 April 2026 with a strong fourth quarter. Net sales hit $2,268.1 million, up 6 per cent year-on-year. GAAP net income reached $388.1 million. Adjusted earnings per share grew 20 per cent to $2.77, beating consensus estimates on both revenue and profit.

That is the headline. It is also a distraction.

The real story at Smucker is not the recovery. It is what the recovery cost, what drove the pressure in the first place, and what management is now quietly admitting about where pricing power ends, and volume destruction begins. This is a useful case study for anyone managing a CPG portfolio in 2026.

A Mixed Full Year Behind a Strong Quarter

The full fiscal year 2026 tells a different story. Net sales grew 4 per cent to $9,050.9 million. Adjusted earnings per share fell 10 per cent to $9.15, dragged down by elevated commodity costs, tariff pressure, and two separate non-cash impairment charges on the sweet baked snacks division.

Operating cash flow reached $1.47 billion for the year, up 22.5 per cent. Free cash flow came in at $1.16 billion, a 42 per cent increase from the prior year.

Those cash flow numbers are genuinely strong. The full-year EPS decline tells you where the pressure was absorbed. The company defended revenue through pricing. It paid for that in volume, margin compression, and impairment charges that reflect the real cost of integrating Hostess.

Read more

The financial results for the full fiscal year ended 30 April 2026 reveal an operational environment shaped by macroeconomic volatility and shifting consumer preferences. Reported net sales for the full year fell 1% to $3.9 billion, showing flat performance on an organic basis. Reported operating income contracted more sharply, down 10% to $1.0 billion, translating into a 2% organic decline. Diluted earnings per share decreased 17% to $1.53, a contraction caused by lower operating profits and the absence of the prior-year investment gain from the sale of The Duckhorn Portfolio.

Despite top-line stagnation, the gross margin expanded by 160 basis points to 60.5%. This structural improvement in gross profitability came from portfolio acquisitions, divestitures, favourable foreign exchange movements, and operational cost timing. Conversely, the operating margin contracted by 240 basis points to 25.5%, heavily impacted by substantial non-cash brand impairment charges recorded during the fourth quarter and elevated selling, general, and administrative expenses.

A comparison of the fourth-quarter performance shows a sharp divergence between short-term volume dynamics and profitability. In the final quarter, reported net sales rose 2% to $912 million, matching the 2% organic growth. However, reported operating income for the quarter dropped by 53% to $96 million, whilst on an organic basis it remained flat, whilst fourth-quarter diluted earnings per share fell by 62% to $0.12.

The consolidated metrics for the fiscal year demonstrate how specific operational drivers dictated performance. For net sales, the drop to $3.9 billion resulted from hurdles following the end of the Korbel relationship and the Sonoma-Cutrer transition service agreement, which were partially balanced by the Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Blackberry launch. The operating income decline to $1.0 billion was caused by the high non-cash brand impairment charges in the fourth quarter and elevated administrative costs. Diluted earnings per share fell to $1.53 because of lower operating profit and the comparison against the prior-year sale of investment in The Duckhorn Portfolio. The gross margin expansion to 60.5% was flat organically, helped on a reported basis by acquisitions, divestitures, foreign exchange, and cost timing. Finally, the operating margin contraction to 25.5% was squeezed by the fourth-quarter brand write-downs and transaction costs.

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The global consumer goods sector faced systemic difficulties during the fiscal year ending 31 March 2026, as high living costs, trade policy changes, and distributor inventory corrections affected premium spirits exporters. Within this context, Rémy Cointreau delivered a performance in line with its revised targets, showing flat organic sales growth and compressed margins. This analysis details the group’s financial results, operational drivers, competitive positioning, and the structural transformation initiated to navigate a volatile global marketplace.

Financial Performance Overview

Rémy Cointreau generated full-year sales of €935.3 million for the 2025-26 fiscal year. This performance represents a modest organic growth rate of 0.2%, which met management’s revised targets. On a reported basis, sales declined by 5.0%, reflecting a substantial negative currency impact of 5.2% that was driven primarily by the depreciation of the US dollar and the Chinese renminbi against the euro.

The group’s operating profitability faced downward pressure, with Current Operating Profit falling by 11.5% on an organic basis to €165.4 million. On a reported basis, Current Operating Profit dropped by 23.8%, reflecting the compounding effects of transactional and translational foreign exchange headwinds. The current operating margin contracted by 2.6 percentage points organically and 4.4 percentage points on a reported basis, landing at 17.7%. This margin compression shows the financial sensitivity of high-end spirits to rising import tariffs and inflation-driven manufacturing costs.

Looking more closely at the core financial metrics, sales fell from €984.6 million in the 2024-25 fiscal year to €935.3 million in the 2025-26 fiscal year, a reported 5.0% drop despite a 0.2% organic increase. The gross margin saw a structural reduction, dropping from 70.6% to 65.8%, representing a reported decline of 4.7 percentage points and an organic contraction of 3.7 percentage points. Current Operating Profit dropped from €217.0 million to €165.4 million, showing a 23.8% reported decline and an 11.5% organic decline. Consequently, the current operating margin moved from 22.0% down to 17.7%.

The contraction in profitability filtered down to net profit attributable to the group, which fell by 35.1% on a reported basis to €78.7 million, down from €121.2 million in the prior year. This organic reduction was 21.1%. This result missed the compiled analyst consensus of €82.4 million. Adjusted net income, which excludes non-recurring items, stood at €89.2 million. This figure was above the consensus average of €83.8 million, supported by tight control over administrative and overhead expenses. Reflecting these pressures, the board recommended a dividend reduction to €0.75 per share, down from €1.50 in the prior year.

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Why is there a disconnect between commercial objectives and operational ability to deliver those objectives?

In this episode, our guest, Pierre-Yves Parent, a transformation and operations veteran from Procter & Gamble, Diageo, and Coty, discusses why growth strategies often fail in execution due to mismatches with a company’s operating model. Parent explains end-to-end physical and data flows, highlighting how interfaces and human interpretation create instability and how the biggest tension arises when moving from design to implementation. Using RTDs as an example, he describes a structural misalignment in commercial operations timelines driven by seasonality, weather volatility, supply constraints, artwork/regulatory variations, retailer codification delays, and inventory/scrap and reporting impacts. The conversation also covers large transformations and carve-outs/mergers, noting early design tradeoffs, legal/IT separation limits, shared services complexity, and how weak governance and undisciplined change management can derail benefits by leaving unresolved resistance and incomplete execution.

00:00 Why Strategies Fail

05:30 Execution Meets Reality

10:40 RTD Supply Chain Chaos

20:24 Inside Big Transformations

34:33 Where Transformations Break

What Is Actually Driving Profitable Growth Today?

Our next executive workshops are designed to answer that question directly.

In a confidential, small-group setting, we combine current research, structured frameworks, and open discussion focused on your specific challenges.

Each one-hour session addresses a single strategic issue — Volume vs. Value, Demand Spaces, Shrinking for Growth — with the aim of moving beyond tactics and clarifying where growth is truly coming from, and where it is not.

Reserve your Spot

Closing signals from the dbAccess Global Consumer Conference — and what changed from Days One and Two.

Three days in Paris. Three different groups of companies. One consistent underlying reality: the lower-income consumer is under serious pressure.

That is where the consistency ends.

Days One and Two were dominated by large legacy operators restructuring to survive and improve efficiency. Day Three brought a different set of companies — Coca-Cola, E.l.f. Beauty, General Mills, Celsius Holdings — and a different strategic conversation. Less about cutting, more about growing. Less about supply chain resilience, more about distribution expansion. Less about portfolio simplification, more about acquisition-led acceleration.

The contrast is instructive.

The Consumer Picture Has Not Changed. The Response to It Has.

On Day Two, companies described a pressured but stable consumer who was not collapsing into private label. Day Three sharpened the picture.

Coca-Cola was the most precise: the “resilient consumer” narrative holds for households earning above roughly $60,000 per year. Below that threshold, it does not. This is not a new observation, but hearing it from Coca-Cola, whose products are present in virtually every income bracket and every geography, gives it weight. If Coca-Cola is redesigning its price-pack architecture and channel segmentation specifically to remain the last item a stressed consumer cuts from their basket, the consumer pressure at the lower end is real and sustained.

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Five signals from Day Two of the dbAccess Global Consumer Conference — and the hard choices they reveal.

Day One in Paris gave us the structural argument. The diversified FMCG conglomerate is over. Focused operators are winning. Portfolio simplification is the dominant strategic logic of 2026.

Day Two gave us the operational reality underneath that argument. And it is more complicated.

The companies presenting on Day Two — P&G, Colgate, Heineken, Molson Coors, Clorox, Newell Brands, Kraft Heinz, Keurig Dr Pepper, Nomad Foods, Primo Brands — are not all in the same position. Some are executing deliberately. Some are cutting their way to stability and calling it strategy. Some are making genuinely interesting structural bets.

The signals from Day Two are less uniform than those from Day One. That is what makes them worth reading carefully.

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Day One signals from the dbAccess Consumer Conference — and what they mean for the decisions you are making now.

Day One of the dbAccess Consumer Conference in Paris brought us insights on Nestlé. Unilever. Estée Lauder. Church & Dwight. Essity.

Different categories. Different geographies. Different balance sheets.

Same conclusion: the sprawling, diversified FMCG conglomerate is being dismantled, and the companies doing the dismantling are not waiting for market confirmation.

That is not merely a cyclical adjustment. It is a structural shift that I have been talking about for the past 18 months.

Here are the five signals Paris sent.

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Asahi Group Holdings has navigated a challenging operational period characterised by a severe domestic system outage alongside strategic international expansion. A major cyberattack on 29 September 2025 compromised core systems in Japan, leading to the postponement of both the consolidated financial results for fiscal 2025 and the first quarter of fiscal 2026. The group has set 8 July 2026 as the scheduled date for the disclosure of its full-year fiscal 2025 results and its consolidated earnings forecasts for fiscal 2026. The delayed first-quarter financial results for fiscal 2026 will be released once the audits are completed.

In the international business units, which remained unaffected by the domestic IT disruption, performance has been mixed but structurally resilient. The group has successfully utilised price adjustments and product-mix premiumisation to protect core operating profits, offsetting volume headwinds in Europe and slower-than-expected demand recoveries in Oceania. Furthermore, Asahi is executing a major geographic portfolio rebalancing. This strategy includes the December 2025 agreement to acquire Diageo plc’s East African operations for a total transaction value of USD 3.0 billion, which secures a high-growth platform in an economically expanding region.

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Is premiumness in RTD as important across demographic segments?

How should an Aldi Private Label compete with Guinness? And what would happen if GLP-1 were available in an oral format?

The second part of the discussion between Andy and Filiberto begins with how conjoint analysis reveals which packaging, price, size, and format cues consumers use in split-second FMCG decisions, highlighting ABV as a simplified signal of value, quality, strength, and flavour intensity, and warning that label “communication architecture” can unintentionally drive choice. It contrasts cans (mainstream, larger scale, often requiring partners) with glass (more premium, niche), and argues that innovation expectations should align with the chosen format’s scale. Research shows willingness to pay varies by demographic and market (e.g., French women and younger Spanish males paying premiums for glass), creating tension between segmentation opportunities and supply-chain de-complexification, while “shrink-to-grow” can open white space for smaller brands and even cross-category competitors.

Finally, Andy presents more insights from Epic’s previous research: 1) a UK study on Aldi’s Guinness-like stout found that alternative design choices (e.g., a glossy gold can and a distinct icon); 2) a separate study on oral GLP-1 formats

00:00 Conjoint Research Setup

01:42 Format Choices And Scale

04:40 Segmentation Versus Supply Chain

19:30 Packaging Signals And Copycats

28:49 GLP-1 Oral Disruption Wrap

What Is Actually Driving Profitable Growth Today?

Our next executive workshops are designed to answer that question directly.

In a confidential, small-group setting, we combine current research, structured frameworks, and open discussion focused on your specific challenges.

Each one-hour session addresses a single strategic issue — Volume vs. Value, Demand Spaces, Shrinking for Growth — with the aim of moving beyond tactics and clarifying where growth is truly coming from, and where it is not.

Reserve your Spot

None of that is invented.

Still, the full story is not a catastrophe. Across a well-documented set of businesses, volume and value growth are happening right now—not in spite of the environment, but within it. Companies that achieve this aren’t simply fortunate; they opt to pursue growth, understand how to capture it, and disclose visible results in physical demand. This clarity sets up what follows.

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When abundance cheapens the commodities, the real and authentic becomes premium.

Customers are trading down where they can, comparing more carefully, accepting private labels with less hesitation, delaying purchases, and rejecting vague claims, all the while reserving their money for the products, services and experiences that feel genuinely worth more. Therein lies the value gap between the authentic and the generic, and the market is already punishing sameness. This process will continue.

The commercial question is how companies continue to create value when “good enough” keeps getting better. This is a demanding environment for every organisation that depends on preference at the point of purchase. Business can no longer assume that reasonable quality and fluent presentation will be enough, since competence has become abundant, and generic adequacy has improved. Familiar formats are easier to imitate, while digital tools, platforms, and now AI systems can produce large quantities of acceptable material at extraordinary speed.

McKinsey’s 2025 global consumer research captures the split. Globally, 79 percent of consumers surveyed were trading down, while more than a third had traded down in one category and planned to splurge in another. People under pressure are sorting their spending with greater discipline, cutting back where the difference feels small and paying more where the difference feels real.[1]

Private label shows the same movement from another angle. Most consumers see private labels as good-value alternatives to name brands, but still say they are likely to treat themselves by upgrading to a premium-brand product.[2] Cheap things are no longer automatically poor, generic things can be decent, available, well packaged and trusted enough for that card to be swiped. Any premium price now has to be earned through a difference people can perceive, and such perceived difference is the leading brand factor in share-price outperformance.[3] Visibility helps people recognise a brand. Difference gives them a reason to care.

Havas’ Meaningful Brands work gives an even keener edge: people would not care if 78 percent of brands disappeared tomorrow, while dynamic adaptability strengthens people’s attachment to brands by 2.3 times.[4] Behind those figures is a cultural condition most people recognise. We are surrounded by messages, offers, images, services and experiences that all seem polished and optimised, and essentially forgettable. A thing functions just fine, but does it create preference?

Value is therefore becoming inseparable from discernment. Organisations will need to sense when their own forms have become tired, when efficiency has stripped away character, when customers are accepting the offer but no longer feeling much for it, when innovation theatre has become a substitute for invention, and when the market is preparing to move before the spreadsheets have caught up with historical data.

This is where interaction with artists begins to look less like a cultural benefit and more like a business capability.

Artists are professional practitioners of sharp perception under conditions of uncertainty. They create meaning while working with form, resistance, rhythm, and tension, and make choices before the result can be 100% foreseen and justified. They follow weak signals and notice changes in atmosphere, appetite, behaviour and form before those changes become stable enough to be named as trends. They spend their working lives in the territory that business often reaches only multiple reviews and reports have arrived.

In an innovation context, creativity allows companies to move beyond optimised repetition, and allow imagination, and attention, to become tactical assets when the operating environment changes faster than what existing systems can process.

A company has a much larger sensory surface than any individual leader. Its people hear things, notice things, read things, sense things and absorb fragments of change through customers, suppliers, families, peers, social media, industry gossip and ordinary life, but the problem is that most organisations have few credible ways of collecting, interpreting and acting on those fragments, and pushing them up the chain of command.

Artists can help build that missing capacity. They can enter a company as outsiders with a particular sensitivity to signs, absences, repetitions and tensions. They can make the familiar visible again. They can help people look at the business from the edge rather than the centre, and create temporary situations in which different forms of intelligence become legitimate: visual, spatial, narrative, bodily, emotional, symbolic, observational and speculative. They can give employees permission to notice things the organisation has trained them to filter out in an effort to get .

Art in a Place of Work

Brought to you by Teatr Trans-Atlantyk - an independent international performing arts company in Warsaw, and a hub for the interaction of business and art

The strongest innovation often begins in precisely that messy place. A routine becomes visible, a product category may reveal a hidden assumption, and a customer complaint will begin to sound like an early signal of changed values. At that moment a leader can recognise that the company’s definition of quality has become narrower than the customer’s definition of value.

This is the missing link between artistic interaction and measurable value. Artists help organisations perceive the conditions from which future value may emerge. The assumption is that they are best used as suppliers of motivational colour, decorative excitement or novelty. In truth, their real value lies in helping companies notice, interpret, imagine and test. In a market where difference has commercial value, that capacity has financial implications.

Data dealing with sustainability, repair and the circular-economy also belongs squarely inside this argument. Consumers are now willing to pay an average premium of 9.7 percent for sustainably produced or sourced goods.[5] European right-to-repair rules and circular-economy policy are pushing companies toward durability, repairability, reuse, waste prevention and longer product life.[6] IKEA’s buy-back, resale, repair and circular-service work extends the relationship between customer and company beyond the first purchase.[7]

These developments show that people are judging value across a longer arc - beyond routine considerations. Can the product be repaired? Can it last? Can it be reused, resold, recycled, returned, updated? Does the company remain present after the transaction? In all these cases, value becomes visible through continuity of attention.

That phrase, continuity of attention, belongs at the centre of the argument for artists in organisations. Artists are trained to sustain attention. They return to a material, a question, a phrase, an image, a sound until something yields, and the process can take a long time. They know how to stay with uncertainty without immediately reducing it to a deliverable. They know that the first answer is often the familiar answer, and that the familiar answer often carries the habits that created the problem, so it is not very useful in terms of being, you know, new.

A company trying to resist generic drift needs this kind of attention. It needs people who can ask why a service feels interchangeable, why a meeting format kills thought, why a workplace says one thing in its values statement and another thing in its physical environment, why customers admire the brand but buy from someone else, why staff comply while withholding imagination, why the product is technically excellent and culturally dull. They will ask the questions in their language, with their vocabulary, not what is familiar to the team. That is, in itself, valuable.

The same logic applies to experience. Mastercard’s 2025 European research, based on more than 15,000 consumers across 20 countries, found that most respondents (over three-quarters in each case) described checking off bucket-list activities as a priority, shopped around for deals before booking, and checked whether these experiences fitted their spending goals. Mastercard Economics Institute data also showed that live events accounted for 32.1 percent of European consumer spending on experiences in 2024, excluding travel and restaurants, up from 30.7 percent in 2019.[8] Following the limitations of Covid, that is hardly surprising.

Carefulness has raised the standard. People will still spend on travel, music, exhibitions, food, theatre, wellness, heritage, sport and encounters that promise memory and meaning. They will also compare harder, delay longer and reject anything that feels inflated, derivative or carelessly assembled. Experience commands value when it changes the texture of attention.

Companies have much to learn from that. A workplace can be experienced as a place of monotonous repetition or as a field of possibility. A training programme can be received as another demand on time or as an encounter that alters how people see their work. A leadership retreat can reproduce the same polished language as the previous year or open a space in which difficult questions can be asked without immediate defensiveness. The difference is rarely only the content. It is the form, the frame, the energy in the room, the quality of listening and the intelligence of the people brought into the process. And L&D leaders in smart companies listen for signs confirming the presence of such things.

Generative AI intensifies the pressure. When objects, concepts and decorative ideas can be produced in seconds, average output becomes more abundant. Some of it will be useful. Much of it will be derivative. A lot will be rather awful, but plenty will be competent enough to increase the volume of acceptable sameness.

Dentsu’s 2026 Consumer Vision study argues that as AI accelerates content creation, originality becomes more valuable, with consumers placing greater importance on human creativity and expecting brands to support and reward it.[9] Pew Research Center’s 2026 summary of American attitudes to artificial intelligence found that about half of U.S. adults thought AI would worsen people’s ability to think creatively and form meaningful relationships.[10] (None of this is any kind of surprising to a culture professional. I wrote about this phenomenon in 2025: https://thecreativefarm.substack.com/p/thoughtless-adoption-of-ai-will-make)

People will use AI where it helps - they already do. The premium will gather around the places where automated fluency cannot satisfy the desire for human intelligence, emotions, craft and empathy. A visually competent image may belovely but still feel empty. A fluent text may still lack judgement on second reading. Personalisation, the holy grail of much marketing, will feel generic if it is not truly personal. The easier it becomes to produce average material, the more valuable real discernment will become.

This is another reason to bring artists into companies. AI can generate options, help people judge which options have life in them and, of course, accelerate production. Artists can help organisations ask whether the thing being produced deserves to exist, and can there possibly be a better thing?

Innovation work needs that disturbance. The front end of innovation is foggy, provisional, contradictory and hard. Companies often want new ideas while protecting the habits that make arriving at those ideas unlikely. They ask for creativity, then process it through templates and incentives designed to reduce discomfort. Artists bring a different kind of rigour into that phase, since they are used to just starting, without full permission from the future.

Peter Robbins and Berit Sandberg’s work on art thinking argues that the front end of research and development needs more than the problem-solving orientation associated with design thinking. They present art thinking as a way of amplifying the “R” in R&D, using artistic practice to support inquiry before the problem is fully stabilised.[11] Sandberg’s study of an artist-in-residence programme at Robert Bosch GmbH is careful in its findings. The exchange with artists did not automatically create technological innovation in a narrow sense, partly because researchers did not always integrate artistic impulses into their working world. Yet the study points to the R&D environment as a fertile field for artists in business and demonstrates the importance of designing the bridge between artistic stimulus and organisational uptake.[12]

That bridge is crucial. An artist in a company does not create value by scattering inspiration like magic dust through the corridors. Value appears when the encounter is structured well enough for people to absorb difference without neutralising it too quickly. The artist must be present enough to disturb routine, trusted enough to be taken seriously, and free enough to retain the quality that made the invitation worthwhile. The company must be prepared to listen, translate, test and stay with uncertainty for longer than usual. Long enough to not fall back into the tried and the true.

Research on artistic interventions in organisations has been pointing in this direction for years. Ariane Berthoin Antal’s work treats artistic interventions as sources of organisational learning, creativity and altered perception, rather than decorative corporate culture projects.[13] Giovanni Schiuma’s work on arts-based initiatives argues that the arts can enhance value-creation capacity and business performance, challenging the one-way view in which business supports the arts while the arts have little to offer business.[14] A stronger claim is now easier to make: artistic interaction can help companies generate the kinds of difference that markets increasingly reward.

The existing practical model of artist engagement is important, of course. A painting in reception will make people feel better, but what I am talking about here is something deeper. A residency can alter the organisation’s sense of itself, a customised performance can create a shared disturbance in the firm, and a publication can turn a period of listening into an artefact that preserves attention in a physical form, not yet another damn digital thing that gets lost in the hard drives of participants as soon as it is distributed. A workshop led by an artist can make participants handle form, timing, voice, material, rhythm or space in ways that bypass the polished abstractions of management language. A long-form engagement can leave behind stories, practices and questions that continue working after the artist has gone. All of that adds layers of imaginative, attentive thinking.

This is where Art in a Place of Work should make its case. The programme belongs in the space between value, innovation and perception. Its purpose is to bring artists into companies as co-thinkers, observers, makers and catalysts, giving organisations structured contact with people whose working lives are built around attention, form, experimentation and meaning. The visible result may be a residency, workshop, talk, publication, internal programme, exhibition, event or long-term cultural process. The deeper result is a company with more sensitive antennae.

Those antennae work conceptually as well as commercially. A market report can tell a company what has already become measurable - an artist can help people sense what is becoming thinkable. A customer survey can reveal dissatisfaction - an artist can help expose the forms of deadness that produced it. A consultancy framework can organise known problems, while artistic interaction can help a company find the problem beneath the problem.

Luxury offers a warning in the context of value. A high price can signal value only when the experience, imagination and craft keep pace. Bain & Company reported in 2025 that the global luxury consumer base had fallen from about 400 million in 2022 to around 340 million in 2025, with new customer acquisition also down. Reuters’ reporting on Bain’s findings described shoppers as feeling alienated by years of price rises that were not matched by creativity - including both aspirational buyers and some very wealthy customers.[15] The market did not turn against excellence, but against the suspicion that price had outrun substance.

The same suspicion can gather around any organisation or any brand. A company may claim innovation while using safe, generic language so as not to sound too edgy. It may speak of people while offering deadening experiences to staff. It may promise quality while designing out care, or commission culture in ways that confirm the very sameness it hopes to escape. Customers, employees and partners have become skilled readers of these signals. They may not always be able to describe what is missing, but they feel the absence.

Intelligent brands are already reacting by making care more visible. Dove has committed to never use AI to represent real women in its advertising, extending its long-running Real Beauty platform into a more explicit position on authenticity in an AI-shaped visual culture.[16] European legislators are making repairability part of consumer rights, so brands in many categories are learning that people judge value through the surrounding system of care: how something is made, maintained, represented, supported, repaired, experienced and remembered. IKEA is building circular services into the customer relationship.

Artists can help organisations understand that system at a human level. They can read spaces, rituals, silences, habits and gestures. They can reveal where the company’s stated values are embodied and where they remain decorative, and create forms through which people feel authorised to speak, notice and imagine. And they can tell stories that are not “corporate storytelling” but real, engaging, authentic tales that carry editorial value, and not just advertorial buzz. Earned media, FTW!

The producer or curator role becomes essential in all this since business audiences are often - rightly - suspicious of airy claims about creativity. They need formats, timeframes, responsibilities, documentation and outcomes. The producer designs the frame, matches artist and company, translates across cultures, protects the integrity of the encounter and ensures that value is captured without reducing the process to a crude metric too early.

The commercial case should be made plainly. Companies that want to command attention, trust, loyalty and premium value need living sources of difference. Culture gives them a way to create those sources from the inside, and interaction with artists can help organisations become more observant, more imaginative and more capable of recognising value before the market has already priced it. That is a practical advantage in a world where acceptable sameness is cheap, fast, ubiquitous and exchangeable.

The companies with the strongest futures will learn to connect the many forms of value that the market is now separating from empty claims. Engineering, service, logistics, sustainability, repairability and price belong in the same system of value creation as beauty, story, atmosphere, memory, trust, imagination and human contact. The way a product is made, the way it feels, the way a customer is treated, the way staff are invited to think, the way an organisation listens, and the way it works with artists all contribute to perceived value.

Art in a Place of Work

Brought to you by Teatr Trans-Atlantyk - an independent international performing arts company in Warsaw, and a hub for the interaction of business and art

Art In a Place of Work belongs in that system. It gives companies a structured way to resist generic drift. It helps them cultivate discernment before sameness becomes a visible commercial problem. By the time accounting has noticed, it is usually too late. Importantly, it brings into the workplace people trained to work beyond the horizon of the obvious, and asks the organisation to meet them there.

Footnotes

[1] McKinsey & Company, “State of the Consumer trends report 2025,” 9 June 2025. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/consumer-packaged-goods/our-insights/state-of-consumer

[2] NIQ, “Private Label & Brand Growth – NIQ Global Outlook 2025,” 27 March 2025. https://nielseniq.com/global/en/news-center/2025/niqs-global-report-reveals-challenges-and-opportunities-for-private-label-and-branded-product-growth/. NIQ, “Finding Harmony on the Shelf: 2025 Global Outlook on Private Label & Branded Products.” https://nielseniq.com/global/en/insights/report/2025/finding-harmony-on-the-shelf/.

[3] Kantar, “Think Different: The DNA of breakthrough brand value growth,” 14 July 2023. https://www.kantar.com/uki/inspiration/advertising-media/think-different-the-dna-of-breakthrough-brand-value-growth. Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, “Why brand difference matters, and what you can do to drive it,” 13 September 2023. https://ipa.co.uk/knowledge/ipa-blog/why-brand-difference-matters-and-what-you-can-do-to-drive-it.

[4] Havas, “Meaningful Brands.” https://meaningful-brands.com/.

[5] PwC, “Consumers willing to pay 9.7% sustainability premium, even as cost-of-living and inflationary concerns weigh: PwC 2024 Voice of the Consumer Survey,” 15 May 2024. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2024/pwc-2024-voice-of-consumer-survey.html.

[6] Directive (EU) 2024/1799 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 on common rules promoting the repair of goods. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2024/1799/oj/eng. European Commission, “Circular economy.” https://environment.ec.europa.eu/strategy/circular-economy_en.

[7] IKEA Global, “Our circular agenda.” https://www.ikea.com/global/en/our-business/sustainability/our-circular-agenda/. IKEA, “Buyback & Resell Service.” https://www.ikea.com/us/en/circular/buy-back/.

[8] Mastercard, “Europe’s Experience Economy is One for the Bucket List,” 26 March 2025. https://www.mastercard.com/gb/en/news-and-trends/press/2025/march/europes-experience-economy-is-one-for-the-bucket-list.html.

[9] Dentsu, “Dentsu Launches New Consumer Vision Study: ‘Mothers of Reinvention,’” 19 May 2026. https://www.dentsu.com/news-releases/dentsu-launches-new-consumer-vision-study-mothers-of-reinvention.

[10] Pew Research Center, “Key findings about how Americans view artificial intelligence,” 12 March 2026. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findings-about-how-americans-view-artificial-intelligence/. Pew Research Center, “How Americans View AI and Its Impact on People and Society,” 17 September 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/how-americans-view-ai-and-its-impact-on-people-and-society/.

[11] Peter Robbins and Berit Sandberg, “Art Thinking: Amplifying the ‘R’ in R&D,” Journal of Innovation Management, 2023. https://journalsojs3.fe.up.pt/index.php/jim/article/view/2183-0606_011.001_L002.

[12] Berit Sandberg, “The Artist as Innovation Muse: Findings from a Residence Program in the Fuzzy Front End,” Administrative Sciences, 2020. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3387/10/4/88. EconStor record https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/240078.

[13] Ariane Berthoin Antal, “Artistic Interventions in Organisations,” WZB report. https://www.wzb.eu/system/files/docs/dst/wipo/effects_of_artistic_interventions_final_report.pdf. Ariane Berthoin Antal, “Research on Artistic Interventions: A Learning Opportunity for the Social Sciences.” https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/207021/1/Full-text-chapter-Berthoin-Antal-Research-on-artistic.pdf.

[14] Giovanni Schiuma, The Value of Arts for Business, Cambridge University Press, 2011. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/value-of-arts-for-business/5FD4C8694A0EEFA146AB303ECB0758FD. Giovanni Schiuma, “The Value of Arts-Based Initiatives,” Arts & Business Northern Ireland report. https://www.artsandbusinessni.org.uk/media/1199/2012-05-15-13-32-43-90-mapping-abis-prof-schiumafinal-1-1.pdf.

[15] Bain & Company, “Global luxury stays resilient despite economic headwinds and shifting consumer trends that reshape market,” 20 November 2025. https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/20252/global-luxury-stays-resilient-despite-economic-headwinds-and-shifting-consumer-trends-that-reshape-marketbain--company-and-altagamma/. Reuters, “Luxury sector to revive in 2026 but price hikes leave shoppers ‘betrayed,’ Bain says,” 20 November 2025. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/luxury-sector-revive-2026-price-hikes-leave-shoppers-betrayed-bain-says-2025-11-20/.

[16] Unilever, “20 years on: Dove and the future of Real Beauty,” 23 April 2024. https://www.unilever.com/news/news-search/2024/20-years-on-dove-and-the-future-of-real-beauty/. Dove, “Real Beauty Pledge.” https://www.dove.com/us/en/campaigns/purpose/real-beauty-pledge.html.

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00:00 Welcome and Preview

01:49 Meet Andy and Epic Insights

04:17 Fast Conjoint Research at Speed

08:22 RTD Study Insight One Drivers

20:05 Insight Two Packaging Premiumisation Wrap

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