AI, on one page.

What it is, where it bites, what it costs, who signs, and where it sits in consumer goods.

1
Ask what goes in and what comes out. If nobody can say, there is no project yet.
2
Most of the value is in simple models you can explain in a sentence.
3
The only score that counts is on data the model never saw. Ask for it.
4
Fluent is not the same as true. Keep a person wherever the answer must be exact.
5
Know what a false alarm costs and what a miss costs. The threshold is your decision, not the vendor’s.
6
Autonomy is earned from the logs, one notch at a time. Start with a person on nearly everything.

Where it sits in consumer goods

Step	What the AI does	Lands in	Ask
Forecast A simple model	Forecasts demand by product and week from history, price and season.	Demand planning, then production orders in the ERP	What goes in, and how far off was it on last year’s peak?
Make The price of wrong	Decides which packs go to the reject bin at the checkweigher.	The reject gate and the quality hold	What does a wasted pack cost against a short-weight complaint?
Ship Who signs	Lets routine orders flow straight through and routes odd ones to customer service.	Order management and retailer messages	What makes an order odd enough for a person, and who decided?
Shelf The assistant	Answers buyer questions from spec sheets, contracts and sell-through reports.	Email drafts to retail buyers	Does every answer cite the document it came from?
Promote Where it bites	Predicts the sales lift from a promotion.	The trade spend plan	How did it do on promotions it was not trained on?

The three questions that settle any AI pitch

1
What goes in, and what comes out?
No clear answer, no project. Yet.
2
How did it score on data it had never seen, and on how many rows?
The demo score is the student marking their own exam.
3
What does a wrong answer cost, and who signs the ones it gets to make alone?
The threshold and the autonomy are your decisions, not the vendor’s.

Illustrative examples, not client results. Nydros · nydros.com/learn/brief?industry=cpg