Mars, owner of Dove chocolate, M&Ms and Pop-Tarts, is preparing for AI shopping agents to handle more of the weekly grocery run, global chief customer officer Neil Reynolds told Digiday. Reynolds said he expects agentic assistants to take over more grocery shopping but does not expect AI to kill the in-store checkout lane, a view based on a future of shopping and retail report Mars wrote with Kantar and Synthesis.
Reynolds described two road maps: making Mars brands discoverable by LLMs and making sure they convert to purchase, and working with retailers on immersive in-store experiences. As a first step, he said, Mars is partnering with emerging tech companies to get baseline data on how its categories and brands show up in LLMs and where that data is sourced from.
Mars is also setting up what it calls One Demand performance squads, which put brand managers, insights staff, key account managers, category managers and agency partners together. Reynolds said Publicis, hired last summer to lead Mars' connected commerce capabilities, gives the company an end-to-end partner that also covers commerce, including data from its connected ID offer. He added that relationships with retailers now need tech-to-tech conversations, asking why Mars' data team is not talking to Walmart's.