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Consumer packaged goods companies are entering a more complex era of competition.

For decades, scale, distribution, advertising reach, manufacturing efficiency, and category management created durable advantages. Those capabilities remain important, but they are becoming less sufficient on their own.

Consumers are more price-conscious, health-aware, digitally influenced, and willing to switch among brands, channels, and product formats.

Retailers are using transaction and loyalty data to strengthen private-label portfolios. Emerging brands can identify niche demand and build awareness more quickly through digital channels. At the same time, many established CPG companies face pressure on volume growth, household penetration, and returns from traditional innovation.

The competitive shift is not being driven by data alone. CPG companies have collected consumer, retailer, and market information for decades. What has changed is the emergence of AI as a broadly accessible intelligence layer capable of processing fragmented information, identifying patterns, modeling possible outcomes, and supporting decisions at scale.

This shift is affecting both sides of the market.

Consumers increasingly encounter algorithmic search, recommendations, social content, retail media, and generative AI as they discover and evaluate products. CPG companies can use AI to interpret internal and external data across portfolio strategy, product innovation, pricing, promotion, demand planning, and operations.

In this report, alternative data refers primarily to external or nontraditional datasets—such as transaction, search, social, mobility, pricing, review, weather, and digital-shelf data—that supplement a company’s internal sales, consumer, and operating information.

Alternative data broadens what CPG leaders can observe. AI provides the intelligence layer that interprets those signals and translates them into scenarios, recommendations, and action.

Data creates visibility. AI creates intelligence, scale, and action.

Together, they are becoming an important part of the modern CPG growth agenda.