Why AI is the New CMO

Welcome to 2025, where AI isn’t just a buzzword—it’s coming for your marketing budget, your media strategy, and possibly your job (unless you learn how to use it first).

I sat down with the one and only Sri Rajagopalan from The CPG Guys Podcast, a man who’s been in CPG long enough to remember when “e-tail” was a thing and when Amazon’s grocery business was a rounding error. Our chat? A deep dive into the shifting sands of AI, e-commerce, and the future of marketing—with some brutal truths for execs who think AI stops at chatbots.

Here’s what you need to know (before AI replaces your team of marketing team 100 with one guy and a laptop):

E-commerce isn’t a department anymore in CPG. Management consultants want to fold e-commerce teams into sales & marketing, but the problem? The old-school brick-and-mortar execs aren’t exactly rushing to learn retail media.

CPG talent development is broken. If you’ve built something from scratch in e-comm, congratulations—you’re an entrepreneur. Now get out, because traditional companies aren’t promoting you. The smart move? Join a mid-tier company where they’ll actually value your skills.

AI is changing media buying overnight. Forget mass advertising—AI can now pinpoint 300,000 Pampers shoppers who thought about buying but didn’t. That’s not a pitch, that’s a market share grab.

Volume growth is a myth (unless you use AI). CPGs keep hiking prices, but AI-driven targeting is the only real path to organic growth.

This was just the beginning. Want to know if your job is safe? Listen to the full episode.

CPG AI Navigator

Let’s be real—AI is coming for CPG, and the execs who figure out how to harness it will be riding the rocket ship while everyone else is… well, still manually updating spreadsheets.

AI will be eating CPG alive—and the execs who figure out how to use it will be printing money while everyone else is stuck explaining why their latest campaign flopped.

That’s why I’m launching the Applied Intelligence CPG AI Navigator —a premium, no-BS newsletter for senior CPG leaders who actually want to win with AI.

What you get (aka why your competitors are about to get nervous):

✔️ Private AI briefings—the insights I can’t share publicly

✔️ Exclusive case studies—real strategies CPG leaders are using right now

✔️ Market intelligence reports—so you always know what’s coming next

✔️ Direct Q&A access—because Googling “WTF is a data clean room” isn’t a strategy

AI is rewiring CPG—are you staying ahead or getting left behind?

🔹 [Join the CPG AI Navigator ] before your competitors do.

I want to hear from you!

Thanks for reading!

See you next week.

Imteaz & the Applied Intelligence team