Consumer packaged goods companies are accelerating AI adoption across media, logistics, and forecasting, but measurable financial returns remain uneven, leaving marketers balancing strong efficiency gains with rising infrastructure costs and investor expectations for faster ROI.
“Build it, and they will come.” This adage implies that building a high-quality product or service will naturally attract customers. Can the same be said about AI, and can it justify its investment and subsequent adoption?
A recent Reuters report said AI adoption is underscored by an ROI imperative to defend its spend.
A 2025 McKinsey & Co report said only the top 6 percent of firms attribute an Earnings Before Interest and Taxes (EBIT) impact of 5 percent or more directly to AI-integrated marketing and sales workflows.
A Retail & CPG In Focus report by Strategy, a large publicly traded business intelligence company, noted that only around 8 percent of organizations had scaled AI analytics across departments by 2025, highlighting that most companies remain in early or pilot stages.
Yet, the tech industry, as a whole, is certainly enameled with AI gloss, hoping, perhaps praying, that it will eventually pay off. And according to reports, certainly assisted by data analytics, it is, perhaps not so clearly in profit terms, but in other areas like efficiency, productivity, and costs, for sure.
“ROI is being realized through faster turnaround times, improved media efficiency typically in the 10–25 percent range, stronger engagement from creative optimization, and deeper CRM audiences built through first-party data. The strongest returns come when AI and data are embedded end-to-end within the marketing operating model,” Mohamed Yousry, Senior Director of Marketing for Mondelēz International, MENAP, said.
Unilever Global CMO and Chief Growth and Marketing Officer Esi Eggleston Bracey recently said: “AI is supercharging creativity and delivering speed, insights, efficiency, and agility for marketing teams.”
According to the 2025 Unilever Smart Briefing Pilot, AI-assisted media planning has delivered up to 58 percent time savings for marketing teams, allowing them to focus on high-level strategy rather than execution.
AI: From tinkering to blooming
The global AdTech market for retail and consumer goods is projected to reach $870 billion in 2026, growing at a CAGR of 9.8 percent, according to a 2026 report by the Business Research Company, a global market research and consulting firm. Across the CPG spectrum, AI and data analytics are rapidly moving away from testing to operating core functions, helping reshape demand forecasting, logistics, personalization, and media planning.
According to a September 2025 BCG report titled “The Widening AI Value Gap”, “seventy percent of potential value from AI is now concentrated in core business functions like marketing and supply chain.”
Highlighting strategic AI integration beyond experimentation, McKinsey partner Hannah Mayer said: “Most CEOs plan to invest more in AI over the next three years… true change on the front end is only possible if retailers and CPG companies also transform their back-end systems.” The company said 71 percent of CPG leaders reported adopting AI applications in at least one business function at the end of 2025.
According to the IAB’s (Interactive Advertising Bureau) 2025 State of Data report, nearly 80 percent of retail media buyers already use or explore GenAI tools for planning, budget simulation, audience segmentation, and automated campaign optimization across fragmented retail networks.
A 2025 NVIDIA retail survey on AI’s impact in areas like efficiency and operational performance across retail and CPG mediums said: “89 percent of respondents said they are using or assessing AI projects, and 94 percent said AI helped reduce costs.”
According to SR Analytics, a full-service data analytics and business intelligence consulting firm, “AI’s ability to absorb real-time data — sales, weather, social signals — allows CPG companies to not just react to historical patterns but predict future demand and adjust production dynamically.”
Forbes said in 2025 that advertising placements inside retailer ecosystems like Amazon is increasingly dependent on AI for campaigns’ planning, performance measurement, and omnichannel attribution, before their launch.
Hussein Safiedine, Media Director at Al Rabiaa TV Network, who also manages the Public Relations of Target Advertising Iraq, said: “Fresh first-party data is essential for practical AI deployment. In Iraq, AI-supported forecasting remains primarily grounded in historical performance, seasonality, and consumption patterns derived from internal data sources. But in digitally mature markets, like Singapore, AI is increasingly used to ingest near-real-time inputs to refine forecasts.”
CPG firms utilizing AI-led data transformation have reported a 20 percent reduction in data processing costs and a 14 percent improvement in “briefing quality” for media agencies, according to Unilever.
A 2025 BCG report said brands using AI-powered “Retail Media Networks” (RMNs) are seeing a 15 percent lift in incremental sales compared to traditional display ads.
CMO and CPG perspectives
According to Business Insider, top CMOs plan multi-million-dollar investments in AI for personalization and consumer insights. P&G is publicly emphasizing AI and data as competitive differentiators, aiming to navigate a fragmented media landscape and better connect data, insights, and relevance across channels.
Bloomberg/Reuters reported on P&G’s Earnings Analysis in January, 2026, saying: “CPG brands are prioritizing data and AI to tackle a fragmented ‘new media reality.’ P&G has upheld sales growth guidance of 1 to 5 percent for fiscal 2026 (by) leveraging AI to uncover consumer-relevant insights faster than ever.”
Commenting on their AI-powered digital twin platform, David Rennie, Head of Strategic Business Units at Nestlé, recently said: “We want to show up where consumers are, with the right message at the right time, and deliver compelling, multi-format content.” Publicis Groupe reported in late 2025 that 80 percent of its connected media business is now powered by AI, which contributed to a 5.5 percent organic revenue increase in Q3, 2025.
The GCC AI CPG challenge
The GCC region holds both barriers and unique structural opportunities for AI integration into CPG retail ecosystems.
Omnichannel challenges in the region include data fragmentation across online and physical retail touchpoints due to legacy systems and unstructured data repositories that hinder unified AI insights.
“Omnichannel in the GCC is growing but still held back by fragmented data across modern trade, traditional retail, e-commerce, and aggregators; limited advanced analytics skills; and siloed distributor reporting. It’s not a tech problem; it’s a data and capability one.
Until there’s reliable, integrated visibility across platforms and trade types, AI can only go so far,” said Mohamed Itani, CEO, United Foods Company, a prominent UAE-based food manufacturing and distribution firm specializing in edible oils, fats, and dairy products.
Inflating costs are infrastructure modernization, stringent data protection laws, and talent needed to bridge skills gaps. Deloitte’s 2026 Outlook notes that while 64 percent of retailers believe they share enough data, only 40 percent of CPG companies agree, citing a “data-sharing gap” as the primary barrier to OmniChannel success in the GCC region.
There is good news. The GCC retail and consumer goods market is projected to expand significantly from a $19 billion base, according to AFP-trusted Globenewswire.
The GCC digital advertising market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 9.4 percent through 2030, with Saudi Arabia’s digital spend expected to surpass $2 billion annually by 2026, according to MarkNtel Advisors, a leading global market research company.
“In MENAP, Mondelez uses AI across media buying and creative optimization to improve efficiency and effectiveness, not reduce spend. AI-driven bidding, pacing, audience optimization, and creative rotation deliver lower CPMs, stronger engagement, faster campaign deployment, and shorter cycles through real-time optimization,” Yousry said. He added that the MENAP division of the American multinational snack company believes that despite strong digital penetration in the GCC, challenges persist around fragmented retail data, inconsistent measurement, and limited integration across media, CRM, and commerce.
Adgully, a Middle East specialized advertising and marketing company, reported in a 2025 survey that over 60 percent of shoppers in the UAE and KSA trust AI-generated content.
“Data is only as valuable as the speed with which it can be acted on. IBM’s ‘Race to ROI’ 2025 report found 44 percent of UAE companies expect AI to deliver ROI within 12 months. In our case, AI has accelerated time-to-insight across sales, logistics, and finance, surfacing inefficiencies we’d otherwise miss. The return isn’t just cost savings; it shows up in working capital, team capacity, and fewer missed opportunities at every commercial layer,” Itani added.
In the UAE, 94 percent of consumers reported positive sentiment toward AI-driven personalized campaigns that respect cultural nuances, a 2025 Unilever Dove Case Study revealed.
AI bubble trouble
In a joint op-ed, Thomas H. Davenport, President’s Distinguished Professor of IT and Management at Babson College, and Randy Bean, an adviser to Fortune 1000 organizations on data and AI leadership, wrote: “We remember the deflation of the dot-com bubble. It’s hard not to see the similarities to today’s (AI) situation, including the sky-high valuations of startups, the emphasis on user growth, the expensive infrastructure buildout, etcetera, etcetera.”
Who is to say when or if a bubble will burst? So far, there is a massive thirst for AI deployment globally and in the GCC. Driven by colossal infrastructure investments, AI spend reached roughly $1 trillion in 2024 and is estimated at over $2.5 trillion by 2026.
Surely the race for being the No.1 global AI company would be worthwhile, but investors and company stakeholders may lose patience before the AI gamble pays off.
(For more insightful interviews and articles, read the special The FMCG Crisis Playbook issue of Communicate in full here)
