A leading CPG enterprise’s promo team sits down for its quarterly planning huddle. What could have been a forward-looking exercise turns into a maze riddled with manual processes, fragmented workflows, and siloed data. Reports and market trends are spread across 30+ dashboards across markets, each requiring multiple hours to clean up and unify. Once the data is consolidated, insights generated, and approvals are ready, they realize their end-to-end planning will take almost 8 weeks.
The fallout is clear:
- Long hours spent to get the data right
- Multiple manual dependencies throughout the process slows down effective decision-making
- Accessibility to generate deeper and relevant insights is limited, affecting real-time actionability
- Static and descriptive dashboards that keep leaders blind to real-time shifts in demands
This remains the scenario in most CPG enterprises that rely on traditional promo planning, where critical insights fall through disconnected dashboards and multiple process gaps.
Enterprises can navigate this challenge by taking an approach that transforms this roadblock into an avenue of opportunities: interactive promo planning, powered by Agentic AI.
Traditional promo planning is bound by inefficiencies – fragmented data, siloed systems, manual workflows, and more. Agentic AI breaks these barriers by connecting processes, systems, and insights to enable enterprises to plan with greater speed, accuracy, and confidence.
Moving from insights-only to insight + action
Traditional promo tool reports that “SKU A’s promo is underperforming or not profitable due to steep discounts.” It ends here – the rest requires manual intervention to interpret, adjust models, rerun simulations, and push execution.
With Agentic AI integration with an interactive system, the solution can not only provide the same insight but also propose a remediation plan, such as “reduce discount on SKU A in retailer chain B by 3 points, shift spend to SKU B.”
Human + agent collaboration, not replacement
Traditional systems often act like black boxes, producing results without context. Users may mistrust the recommendations, leading to heavy reliance on analysts for interpretation.
With an interactive promo tool, transparency and collaboration are built in. The system surfaces candidate paths, explains assumptions, and allows users to override or tweak. For instance, it might recommend “reduce promo spend on SKU Z,” while showing elasticity curves and margin impacts, enabling managers to adjust the decision with confidence.
From manual follow-ups to autonomous flow
Valuable time is lost in manual dependencies in traditional promo planning – hours spent in chasing email-follow ups, consolidating reports, and waiting for approvals. These repetitive tasks slow decision-making and distract planners from focusing on strategy and outcomes.
An agentic framework removes these bottlenecks through automation. From collecting data from multiple sources, generating real-time reports, to triggering approval workflows – Agentic AI can create an autonomous workflow, liberating teams from redundant tasks to focus on decision-making.
From static struggles to interactive intelligence
Traditional promo planning forces teams to navigate through static dashboards that demand hours to piece together fragmented reports, often requiring technical expertise to extract the simplest insights. This not only affects decision-making but also creates a dependency on specialized analysts for answers.
An Agentic AI-powered interactive interface makes this roundabout process dynamic, contextual, and accessible. Each user, based on their persona, receives personalized guidance and insights relevant to their role. With multiple dashboards streamlined, accessibility to insights becomes instant, empowering users to make faster, smarter, and user-centric planning.
Agentic AI – Not a Silver Bullet
Not all promo planning challenges are readily solved with Agentic AI intervention. Promo planning remains an exhaustive process with unique workflows that are shaped by market dynamics, retailer relationships, and enterprise-specific processes. The right combination of tools, data, and expertise is crucial to delivering meaningful results.
MathCo’s Agentic promo planning does not replace but augments pre-existing intelligence built within enterprises with Agentic AI. This ensures a future-fit, more interactive, insight-driven, and resilient solution.
Outcomes delivered, the MathCo way
Our experience in partnering with multiple Fortune 500 CPG enterprises has helped us develop an optimal Agentic promo planning module that can further be contextualized based on business needs. Some of the outcomes we have delivered include:
- Value realized in 3 – 4 months through quick POCs
- $90M Impact unlocked in last the 12 months
- 5+ Successful Implementations
- ~60% of promo planning tasks auto-executed
- 25+ hours saved per promo planner per cycle
- 50 – 60% reduction in average time to incorporate strategic changes
Take the Next Step with Agentic AI
For the CPG promo team struggling to finalize their quarterly promo plans and waiting weeks for stitched insights, this shift takes them to a brighter tomorrow. Instead of reports that highlight problems but leave action to human interpretation, an Agentic AI–powered interactive framework brings together siloed data, real-time adaptation, and goal-driven decision-making into one continuous flow.
This is where the future of promo planning is headed—no longer reactive, fragmented, and slow, but interactive, adaptive, and agent-driven. Interested in learning how MathCo can make your promo planning journey future-ready with Agentic AI? Write to us at [email protected] for a free workshop.
Learn more about our offerings, the challenges we solve, and how we solve them for the CPG industry here.
