Georgia-Pacific’s experience rolling out AI carries important lessons for businesses of all sizes.
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Georgia-Pacific, the company behind household products like Brawny Paper Towels and Dixie Cups, has spent the past few years figuring out where AI actually earns its place inside a company of more than 30,000 employees.
Like many businesses, the manufacturing giant started experimenting quickly after ChatGPT arrived. Matt Robuck, Georgia-Pacific’s vice president of data and analytics, describes that early period as a “technology-first approach” with companies, including his own, trying to deploy agents “for the sake of deploying agents.”
“What we found through that process is that that doesn’t really work,” Robuck says.
One of those early experiments was a sales agent designed to help employees identify potential customers. But its answers weren’t reliable enough for Georgia-Pacific to feel comfortable putting it into employees’ hands, so the company shelved it.
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The second attempt went differently.
By then, Robuck says, the company had become more deliberate about starting with the business outcome it wanted and working backward from there. With better data, metadata, and context behind it, the rebuilt agent eventually made it into Salesforce and into the hands of more than 100 salespeople. Eight months later, Robuck says it had surfaced prospects that led to more than 100 deals.
“We learned the hard way that when you don’t start like that, the chance of success and getting good business value goes way down,” he noted.