Integrated Data Strategies: Mondelēz and PepsiCo Leaders Share How Holistic Insights Drive Omnichannel Growth

If your team is still optimizing content in a vacuum, reacting to sales weeks after they happen, or relying on spreadsheets to route supply, it may be high time for a strategic reset. 

At the Digital Shelf Summit (DSS), Cristina Marinucci, VP of global growth and omni commercial insights at Mondelēz, Iwao Fusillo, former global head of data and analytics for digital commerce at PepsiCo, and Sai Koppala, chief marketing officer at CommerceIQ, shared how their organizations are using integrated data across functions to enable smarter decisions and unlock faster growth.

Here are some key takeaways from their session, “The Power of Integrated Data: How Leading Brands Use Holistic Insights for Omnichannel Growth,” which offers practical insights into how global brands are using real-time data, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI) to stay ahead in a complex market.

Don’t Just Say Digital, Make It Happen

While many might talk a big game about making digital a priority, putting it into practice often takes more than good intentions. 

And even when teams want to prioritize digital, many consumer packaged goods (CPGs) organizations still default to brick-and-mortar by inertia. Support functions tend to follow the revenue, and, for now, that often still means physical retail.

For Mondelēz and PepsiCo, making digital real meant designing their teams for digital action. Both brands adopted a more functional model, one that includes dedicated ecommerce sales, marketing, and supply chain teams, all pulling from a shared enterprise-wide data infrastructure.

They’ve also built around a shared source of truth, making it easier to align on the five key ecommerce levers — assortment, availability, visibility, content, and value — and course-correct in real-time.

“What doesn’t work is putting 10% of the marketing team’s brains, the supply chain team’s brains, the sales team’s brains, and assuming we can make significant progress on a digital transformation,” Fusillo says. “That typically doesn’t work.”

Data-Driven Decision-Making

If you’re working off sales data that’s already weeks old, reacting in real-time becomes effectively impossible. 

That’s why both Mondelēz and PepsiCo turned to digital shelf analytics to spot and solve problems faster, long before they show up in lagging revenue reports. For example, Marinucci explains that her team doesn’t just track share of digital commerce, but benchmarks it against category growth, aiming to outpace the broader snacking market. 

“Sales data lags,” she says. “So the digital shelf analytics is in real time, and we can be agile and optimize off that in real time, especially with the economy fluctuating so much recently.”

In a pilot program with CommerceIQ across Walmart and Amazon, that approach paid off: Mondelēz saw a more than 50% lift in return on ad spend (ROAS) and saved $4 million in wasted media spend, all within just three months. 

Unlock The Power of AI, But Don’t Let It Outrun You

Generative AI (GenAI) is a very buzzy tool, but without thoughtful guardrails, it can quickly become another liability. 

Fusillo called out agentic AI, automated, task-oriented agents, as a fast-emerging force in ecommerce. From optimizing supply chains to surfacing smarter sales insights, these tools could eventually stitch together workflows across departments.

However, they also introduce complexity, which can become problematic when different teams start deploying their own solutions without a shared governance model.

“AI, in the past, was generally governed by a central IT … or analytics team,” Fusillo says. “With the advent of agents … we may see a more distributed model — and therefore, governance becomes very challenging.”

Marinucci echoes that concern. Instead of relying on tools like OpenAI, Mondelēz is building an internal platform to keep tighter control over brand and data privacy. 

“We’re a little risk-averse there, so [we] pulled back [from external tools],” she says. “But we’ve created our own platform that we can upload data to, and use that in a similar way.”

In practice, that means blending experimentation with strong oversight. Both leaders emphasized the importance of human guidance, whether for sentiment analysis, localized content creation, or preventing costs from escalating.

What This Means for Ecommerce Leaders

If you aren’t using integrated data or if insights are siloed, you’re likely letting your fastest-growing channel outpace your ability to capitalize on it.

The speakers made it clear: Long-term ecommerce success depends on more than visibility. It requires automation that scales, governance that holds up, and teams who can translate data into action across creative, operations, and strategy. 

And crucially, it takes leadership that treats digital like a core profit and loss (P&L) statement, one with ownership, budget control, and a seat in enterprise planning.

Resourcing matters, too. As Koppala points out, if your digital shelf were a flagship store, would you staff it with a skeleton crew? Probably not. Yet many brands still underinvest in the very functions that now shape online performance.

Your next leap in performance won’t come from another tool. It’ll come from tighter alignment, specialized talent, and systems (and people) that actually work together.