Jess (00:00)
Welcome to Dig Inspiration, a quick recap where we dig deeper into the story behind the story. In each bite-sized episode, I'll revisit key moments from our incredible guests, highlighting the most inspiring parts of the stories they share.

And today we're dropping a quick reflection on some of the most memorable parts of my talk with Nick Graham, former head of insights and analytics from Mondalese and PepsiCo. He's now helping transform businesses from his own freelance consulting gig. And yes, as I knew, I did fangirl out, but that's what I'm allowed to do anytime I get to talk to Nick. There were about a dozen points I could pull out from Nick's story on tackling the topic of equity at PepsiCo. I mean, what a huge endeavor that touches so many parts of the globe and so many parts of the business.

But I'd like to come back to the three components that Nick talked about. That is conviction, clarity, and ownership. Just take a pause to scroll down there. So conviction was all about determining how PepsiCo would define equity. What were they actually trying to measure? And I'm imagining that any of those agile sprint meetings with that task squad, they undoubtedly pointed back to that definition of equity as their North Star. And that conviction

that surrounded what they were actually trying to suit. And that conviction that actually tackled what are they trying to measure was just such an important part of the overall initiative. Then you can move to clarity. And this is about not just jumping to solutions, but really marinating in the problem. Because some people were trying to fulfill a strategic planning need, others a real time measure of in market activity, others wanted to understand consumer behavior. The needs were all over the place. And it wasn't about what

the stakeholders liked or didn't like about current solutions, but really in identifying the gap between what they wanted to achieve and what they could achieve today. That doesn't make sense. The needs are all over the place, and it wasn't about what they liked or didn't like about current solutions, but really in identifying the gap between what the stakeholders wanted to achieve and what they could achieve at the time.

And then ownership played out in a lot of ways, but I love the example of how the local markets, once the program was rolled out, were not only responsible for ensuring the results were answering the market's question in a really quality way, but also in engaging other markets and advocating for the work. So you think about the champion in Brazil, right? Once those results were coming out in Brazil, how could she engage her stakeholders in Chile and in Argentina? That ownership had no...

That ownership no doubt supported the global adoption of the new program in a really powerful way. So like I said, a dozen lessons in Nick's story about equity at Pepsi, but that idea of conviction, clarity and ownership, it's worth committing to memory. And in Nick's current role, consulting clients on deploying AI capabilities, I think it's so important to highlight that at the end of the day, it's about what job are you hoping to solve through AI? What human need, what human objective are you trying to solve for?

Are you trying to save time? Are you trying to get better insights, save money? If you don't have clarity on the job you're hiring AI to fulfill, you won't solve it intentionally and you won't be able to measure if your solution has addressed that problem. So it's really easy to get caught up in this mad dash to launch these capabilities. But go back to that idea of conviction around the problem to be solved. It really helps you introduce capabilities that will maximize value for your organization.

Well, that's your Dig inspiration recap for the week. We would love to hear your takeaways and thoughts on the conversation. So please visit the link in the description and leave us a comment.