Danone's digital transformation: Empowering growth and enhancing operational performance

Since 2021 Danone has invested in OneSource, our corporate data platform. Here we construct our single sources of truth and build use case specific data products, fueling and accelerating digital capabilities like our consumer and patient engagement platform. This platform is a key driver of our digital marketing strategy and growth ambitions. We are revolutionizing consumer engagement by developing innovative brand platforms, apps like the Aptamil Growth Tracker, and various services. Utilizing AI and enriched data sets, we create personalized, immersive experiences that educate, inspire, and promote healthier choices.

By leveraging first, second, and third-party data along with new AI models, we deliver hyper-personalized consumer journeys at scale, gaining deep insights into consumer preferences and behaviours. A recent Actimel campaign in the UK saw a 50% increase in engagement, a 6% uplift in sales, and a 70% surge in search volume. Next to the increased engagement, with Gen AI we are achieving up to a 50% reduction in asset production time and a 25% gain in related cost efficiency.

In line with Danone’s Corporate Strategy (Renew), to bring science at the core of our innovation model, another key data centric evolution is taking place in our Research & Innovation (R&I) centers. By harnessing consumer and health data, we redefine science, applying advanced AI models to drive innovation and change the way we design, create and test our products, enhancing speed to market, and ensuring our consumers and patients receive high-quality and wholesome products.

Our digital ambition and the related process, data and tech transformations, requires for Danone to reinvent itself in terms of how we best embrace the latest trends and how we most effectively design, build and bring new capabilities to life, thus leveraging new organizational structures, governance bodies, roles, and methodologies, all inside a new data and tech centric corporate culture.

With our focus on fast adoption and engagement, Danone is training all its employees in AI while making AI tools available to support everyone’s daily activities. Driving efficiency while at the same time “learn and embrace AI by doing”.

Recognizing the importance of upskilling its employees, Danone is partnering with Microsoft in launching a joint AI Academy. This initiative is designed to equip all Danone employees with the skills needed to thrive in an AI-powered economy, ensuring that Danone's workforce is prepared for the future. It underscores our commitment to innovation and continuous improvement, positioning the company at the forefront of the industry.

To support and enable Danone’s digital journey and to ensure we build, deploy and run our new capabilities with the right levels of integration, security, and with sound process, data and technical architecture, we have - at corporate level - organized ourselves through Centers of Excellence (COEs) for key topics like AI, Cyber Security, ERP Transformation, Data Governance, and the Modernization of our Technology Landscape.

With higher levels of automation and data dependency, resilience and operational excellence of our technology application landscape is of utmost importance. The daily need to serve 90K users and 5M transactions, while managing 8 petabytes of data, all at the right service levels avoiding business disruption, makes the modernization and future proofing of our corporate technical foundation the proud cornerstone of all digital plans.