The SGV Knowledge Institute, together with EY-Parthenon and SGV Consulting, held a forum titled “AI Pulse: Shaping Consumer Futures,” at Shangri-La at the Fort, Manila. The event explored the transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the consumer goods and retail sectors.
As businesses navigate the complexities of a rapidly evolving digital landscape, the forum addressed how AI has revolutionized consumer engagement, supply chain management, and product innovation. The event brought together local and international subject matter resources who shared insights and strategies for leveraging AI to drive growth and efficiency in the industry.
The program commenced with opening remarks from SGV chairman and country managing partner Wilson P. Tan, who highlighted the significance of AI in modern business strategies. The first session featured presentations from Olivier Gergele, EY-Parthenon Asia-Pacific consumer leader, and Shaurya Ahuja, EY-Parthenon partner in leading Digital Value Creation in the Consumer Products and Retail (CPR) sector, who discussed the pivotal role of AI in transforming consumer products and retail.
Christian Domingo, digital business development head at NutriAsia, Inc., spoke about his company’s AI journey, encouraging audience engagement through a Q&A session.
Other speakers included:
- Maria Kathrina Macaisa-Peña, SGV partner
- Marie Stephanie Tan-Hamed, SGV partner
- JJ Tan, EY-Parthenon associate partner
- Kunal Sethi, EY-Parthenon senior manager
- Marcus Wong, EY-Parthenon senior manager
The speakers delved into four critical themes: whitespace identification and innovation, direct consumer engagement and hyper-personalization, transparent and agile supply chains, and agentic AI for process automation.
Maria Kathrina S. Macaisa-Peña, SGV consumer products and retail leader, said “Agentic AI can enable complex third-party risk assessments for suppliers without constant human intervention by leveraging real-time intelligence from submitted requirements and online information. It can also bring transformative value to the finance function through data understanding and reporting, knowledge management, and content creation (GenAI and Machine Learning).”
Olivier Gergele said “While AI is not new, the AI landscape has been evolving rapidly with GenAI, and more recently, Agentic AI has been revolutionizing different sectors. Leading players have moved away from a use case-driven approach and are now focusing on a set of transformative opportunities to drive incremental shareholder value.”
Shaurya Ahuja said “Organizations face four key pitfalls in leveraging Gen AI and Agentic AI: lack of direction, excessive focus on governance, an unstructured approach to integration, and difficulty in acquiring necessary skills. While Gen AI offers valuable use cases, companies often struggle with understanding its impact on P&L. To overcome these challenges, a strategic, top-down approach aligned with transformation goals is essential for effectively classifying opportunities by their impact on business models.”
Christian G. Domingo, digital business development head of NutriAsia, Inc., said “Data cleanliness should be paramount before any form of formal AI exploration, as old, incomplete, or poorly formatted data will directly affect output and may trigger AI hallucinations. Therefore, it is essential to invest in data management and organization software; more importantly, we must instill a sense of good data governance practices across the organization and at all levels for the true power of AI to be harnessed.”
In addition to keynote presentations, the event included breakout sessions designed for in-depth discussions on practical AI solutions related to these themes. Participants had the opportunity to engage actively with SGV and EY Partners and subject matter resources to explore the implementation of AI technologies in their organizations.
The forum concluded with closing remarks from Maria Vivian C. Ruiz, SGV vice chair and deputy managing partner, outlining the key takeaways from the discussions.
The SGV Knowledge Institute serves as a hub for intellectual exchange and advancement, leveraging SGV’s collective thought leadership and the deep experience of its multidisciplinary professionals. By fostering continuous learning, knowledge-sharing, and innovation, SGV aims to empower businesses to navigate the challenges and opportunities presented in today’s business landscape. SGV is a member firm of EY Global and EY-Parthenon is a brand under which a number of EY member firms across the globe provide strategy consulting services.