Treasury Wine Estates uses AI agents to find consumer insights

Treasury Wine Estates (TWE) has built two AI agents to interrogate trend data and suggest ways to potentially capitalise on what that data says.

The agents are called Aivi and Viti, and were developed through a partnership with GPTStrategic.

Managing director for TWE’s Treasury Premium Brands division Angus Lilley told Digital Nation that the company wanted to solve a problem around utilising the various forms of wine consumption data and industry reports available to it.

“One of the things about the global wine industry we work in is that there's no shortage of trend reports. There's no shortage of information around the place that we could tap into," Lilley said.

"But one of the challenges we had was consolidating and keeping all the information and reports in one place, and then secondly, how efficiently we interrogated all that information and thought about the trends [and] insights.”

This was previously a manual and "very human-led endeavour", Lilley said. It took significant time, and there was a danger of personal biases impacting or influencing the "trends or the insights from that information.”

TWE started an overhaul of the process by consolidating roughly 3500 documents onto a SharePoint site, which continues to be added to to this day. This is also the central resource that the AI agents tap into.

The Aivi agent has been developed “very much around the distillation of that information into trends insights that we can use," Lilley said.

“[Viti] is more forward-facing or future-facing in terms of how we can capitalise on those trends [and] how we can think about different innovations. In many ways, we've got a bit of a futurist on our hands in terms of looking forward and really how we can continue to build our portfolio to capitalise on the latest trends we're seeing in the industry."

Aivi and Viti now focus on refining insights and making the most of consumer trends, allowing TWE “to far more efficiently and effectively bring together the insights from all the information and industry reports we have.”

“In terms of the insights, the information, [and] the ideas the bots are generating and driving to our team, we're really excited," Lilley said.

He said the consumer insights team at TWE now has more time to put towards broader company objectives.

“There's no doubt our teams are now spending less time on digging through different reports and we're getting to some of those insights much quicker than we were," he said.

“We've got a number of different brands across the entire portfolio, so having our teams thinking about what's next and having the information at the click of a button or in response to a dedicated prompt is allowing us to make faster decisions."

Lilley saw the potential for AI agents to be used elsewhere in the TWE business such as in the sales and marketing domains.

He said TWE has already “embraced technology in a number of different spaces from robotics in the winery, our operations facilities through to generative AI and the more consumer side of things.

“We're continuing to upskill the organisation in the use of tools like this and we expect that to continue for some time.”