My name is Jake Oscherwitz, and I’m a rising sophomore studying Cognitive Neuroscience and Finance at Washington University in St. Louis. This summer, as a St. Louis Entrepreneurial Fellow, I’ve had the privilege of working with Well Principled (YC S19), a tech startup changing how corporations in the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry operate by creating bleeding-edge software that provides executives with insights leading to superior decision making. Well Principled’s innovative approach rooted in academia, superior AI research & implementation, and one-of-a-kind organizational structure has contributed to clients growing Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) by over 400%, improving gross margin by up to 16%, and growing revenue per email up to 260%.
When examining the AI industry, it’s clear that the adoption and implementation of this technology into work is occurring rapidly and affecting how corporations do business. For instance, according to McKinsey & Company’s “The state of AI in 2020”, “50% of respondents report that their companies have adopted AI in at least one business function.”
Even more significant is that in supply-chain management, 35% of those surveyed reported a revenue increase of at least 6% when incorporating AI solutions and in marketing & sales. Such numbers point to the clear effectiveness of incorporating AI into business activities. When it comes to marketing & sales and supply-chain management, it’s clear to see why Well Principled would cater its AI solutions into these specific areas.
Speaking of sales and supply chain, the CPG industry has struggled to adapt to innovation, unlike popular industries such as Healthcare or Automotive, which are rooted in cutting-edge discovery. According to BCG, order lead times have decreased by 4 days, weekly demand volatility has increased 17 percentage points, and retailers have decreased inventory levels by 25% between 2013 and 2018. Such alarming trends clearly showcase the inefficiencies and a lack of innovation occurring.
CPGs are in need of solutions that allow them to properly understand profit-maximizing inventory quantities and retailer expectations. For Well Principled, who was looking for an industry to create value in, CPG’s immortalized importance in society coupled with lack of innovation made the startup’s various solutions a perfect market fit.
Well Principled’s positioning serves as a case study for the future of AI and predictive analytics, which will ultimately progress the data-driven society we’ve become. Successful AI applications won’t occur through large companies such as Facebook and Google. Instead, such use of AI in society will occur on a granular level through specialized firms catered to unique industry needs.