Where Do You Start With AI at Scale?

Where Do You Start With AI at Scale? | Managing Director, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners Aus, Orlando Rodriguez.

MIT's 2025 research found that 95% of organizations get no measurable P&L impact from generative AI investment. How does a multi-billion dollar, asset-heavy company actually make AI work at scale?

Success requires discipline, business-led prioritization, and applying AI to genuine business problems.

In this episode of Applied AI Australia, powered by Acquire Intelligence, Ramon Rodriguez speaks with Orlando Rodriguez, Managing Director of Coca-Cola Europacific Partners Australia, about how one of Australia's largest brands approaches AI at scale.

CCEP operates across Australia, serving 100,000 customers with 500 products, creating 50 million permutations at any time. Its AI work spans live manufacturing diagnostics, commercial planning, and agricultural crop genetics.

Key results discussed:

• Live diagnostics on manufacturing lines replacing hours of manual analysis with real-time recommendations for technicians

• Commercial planning reviews automated, saving 6-7 hours a fortnight

• AI-enhanced sugarcane crops with Avalo improving yield, drought resistance, and fertilizer efficiency

• Driverless forklifts and a robot dog for quality checks deployed across manufacturing sites

• 50 million customer-product permutations managed with AI precision

Key takeaways:

• Approaching AI as a core business tool

• Fixing the root causes behind failing AI investments

• Why business leaders must own and drive AI strategy

• Prioritizing use cases using the "headroom to grow" framework

• Applying the "point of departure, point of arrival" transformation framework

• Why data quality is the essential foundation you can't skip

• How hiring shifts toward EQ, learning agility, and curiosity as machines augment IQ

5 Key Leadership Questions:

• Where is the headroom to grow in our business?

• What genuine business problem or opportunity does this AI solve?

• Do we have the data quality and governance to support this?

• Does this initiative deliver measurable value?

• If we try to do everything at once, what will we actually do well?

Your 48-hour action:

Choose one AI initiative in your organization and ask: Does this solve a genuine business problem with headroom to grow the top line or take out cost? If not, deprioritize it.

Chapters

00:00 Cold open: Business leadership in AI

01:32 Orlando's background and Coca-Cola's scale

04:27 Three core tenets: team, customers, platforms

05:16 100,000 customers, 500 products, 50 million permutations

09:29 AI for live manufacturing line diagnostics

11:17 Partnering with Avalo on AI-enhanced sugarcane genetics

17:26 When Coca-Cola started focusing on generative AI

17:53 Robot dogs and driverless forklifts

20:37 Why AI must be led by business leaders

24:05 Have you seen tangible benefits?

25:05 The 700 million question: who's accountable?

29:01 Point of departure, point of arrival framework

31:26 Lessons learned: data is the basement

36:07 Zero FTE departments and the future of jobs

38:12 Obsessed with benchmarking to top quartile

38:38 What's Pepsi doing with AI?

39:02 Top tips for executives starting their AI journey

42:16 Final takeaways

Applied AI Australia is powered by Acquire Intelligence.

We help Australian companies turn AI investment into measurable business value, deciding what to fund, what work must change, where value should land, and who owns the result.

Get in touch: https://www.appliedaiaustralia.com.au/book-briefing

Ramon: linkedin.com/in/ramonrod

Guest: Orlando Rodriguez, Managing Director, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners Australia