Today, we're joined by VIP CEO Andrew Criezis
and head of sales who send to Aqua to discuss where the industry is headed
and what customers can expect next.
Andrew, it's great to see you. How are you?
Good. Thanks for having me, right?
Lucinda, how are you?
So great. Excited to be here.
Yes, and our audience is excited to hear about VIPs capabilities
with AI because it is a topic that is top of mind
for so many founders at this point.
Andrew, as I mentioned, VIP has been around for over 50 years.
Your background is pretty interesting because you bring so much to the table as CEO,
how did you come to VIP?
Yeah, great question, Ray.
And I think it does go back to the legacy of VIP.
So I'm incredibly passionate about the beverage and alcohol industry.
The broader CPG industry as a whole.
So I spent the last 12 years plus working at Nielsen IQ,
working with many of the suppliers that could be listening to this,
distributors and retailers.
It was about five years ago that I first interacted with VIP.
And it's actually a partner to Nielsen IQ.
And so complimentary partnership was created.
And I got to know the company a little bit.
I got to see the value of what VIP creates in the industry
and how it helps support the three-tier system.
And I was just blown away also by the people
by just the caliber of the talent,
how respected they were in the industry,
how much knowledge they had across the three-tier system.
And so once I started to get to know the company a bit more,
I saw just the opportunity for the technology
to do so much more across the industry.
And with AI as we were talking about
becoming really important and accelerating every day, every week,
I started to realize it's a huge moment for AI and technology
and more investment to come into VIP,
really help our clients help the suppliers,
help the distributors and retailers
and transform how operations and the data work is getting done.
So I just saw that as a great opportunity, both in the technology and AI side,
leveraging all of my data background and knowledge in the industry,
but then joining a group that has an amazing culture,
an amazing team, and a ton of passion behind it.
Lucinda, when you came to VIP,
you also came with a ton of experience.
Just talk a bit about your background in this industry.
Yeah, thanks, Ray.
So I like to say I was born and raised in the beer business,
but I got here as soon as I could,
started what I was 21 with Boston Beer Company.
I've worked in all three tiers of the three tier supply chain over the last 20 years.
And I showed up to the first day to the VIP office here in Burlington,
and I felt like I should be asking for autographs,
because VIP is the only set of data and the only set of tools that I've ever used
on any of the three tiers.
So it was really remarkable to see the team of people
that has built such an incredible organization and really built from the ground up
over the past 50 plus years if VIPs existed.
So I'm honored to be here a part of the team now
to help carry the sales team into the future
with all this new, agentic work that we're going to talk about.
Andrew, let's just start off by talking about
where the beverage industry is headed right now in broad terms
and why AI is such a critical strategic investment for founders and businesses.
You know, I think about whether you're a small supplier
or distributor or a large supplier, you know, the beverage alcohol space.
You could be only a few people at your company or hundreds at the end of the day.
Everyone's looking for efficiency.
Whether you're three people within your company,
you're stretching yourself to try to do five jobs,
or again, you're a larger company with maybe 10 people in a finance department.
You're all trying to find better ways to do what you're doing
so you can drive more product to consumers.
So AI is just coming at this perfect moment over the last six to 12 months
where everyone needs it.
Everyone needs it for similar reasons, front efficiencies,
whether it's helping you run some reporting,
it's helping you with pricing, it's helping you optimize something.
At the end of the day, there's never enough hands and arms within a company
when you're building a brand.
And I've experienced that, you know, working with hundreds and hundreds of founders
over the last 12 years in my past role with Nielsen IQ.
And I see that with VIP.
So I think all of the industry, both suppliers,
distributors retailers, are looking at AI to try to understand
how can I drive more efficiency?
How can I drive a better delivery of my service or product to the end customer?
And how can I do it in a way that's going to set me up for success?
But now many people are taking it in different ways.
You know, AI isn't something that's just intuitive and you throw on a chat bot
and all of a sudden you're up and running.
So it's really interesting to see how suppliers are leveraging AI,
how distributors are leveraging AI, retailers, etc.
And there's some fun nuances between those three.
When it comes to spending money on AI or otherwise,
founders want to see return on investment.
And I'm curious about how you measure return on investment when it comes to AI.
And also, there's so much hype about AI at this point.
Where does hype meet reality?
Lusinda, can you tackle both questions for me?
Yeah, great questions.
So I think I'll tackle the ROI question first,
because I think it will address the buzzword as well.
But I think when you think about AI,
I was thinking back to all these different technological advances
and how they've impacted the industry all the way back to when we used to
have roles of quarters to get on the pay phone and then all of a sudden cell phones
helped to make us more efficient.
Same thing with printers and then the internet.
I think of AI in the same way.
It will give us the ability to enable all of our teams to be that much faster,
that much smarter, smarter by way of better insights from the data.
So if we're able to take a sales report, a sales rinker,
and extract out the insights that much faster and distill down to the actual accounts
we should be spending our time in, that to me is an instant ROI.
There's also backup house applications.
We think we talked with our distributors about some of the features
that are most important to them is we're building out our new agente platform.
And it's things like avoiding the fat finger on the order.
We don't want 10, we want one, we don't want 100, we want 10.
And so giving the teams the ability to capture those things in advance,
I think is where we see the ROI.
It also empowers our retailers to make better orders.
So think of predictive ordering in an e-commerce platform like Connect.
There is so many great things that we can do to empower across all three of the tiers
using all of our agente features that we have in place now.
So if I'm a retailer, if I'm a distributor, if I'm a supplier,
that's how I think about the ROI.
And it really enables the humans to be better at their jobs.
So that in itself, I think is the buzz.
I encourage people to think about AI as more of a tool and a way to do their business,
a way to go about seeking the outcomes they're looking for versus this buzz word of a tool.
And I think when we all begin to embrace it much more,
we'll see that firsthand as well.
Obviously technology is moving faster than it ever has before.
And it's incumbent upon VIP to provide technology that is keeping up with the times.
Or in this case, keeping up by the day.
Yeah, I think you're spot on with it's evolving every day,
every week new models come out,
Able five came out for the second time.
So with the constant, it's been great.
I've had a few conversations just recently with some distributors and suppliers.
And when we talk about the investments,
one of the things that came out clearly from our clients was,
they are interested, they are getting pressure to use AI.
And so initially, whether you're a founder on this call, a supplier,
distributor, the thought process was, let's just take JetGBT,
let's take Claude, let's just turn it on for everyone,
and like let's go get some insights.
And you can get some gains and insights there, but ultimately those clients came to us and said,
hey, first, really, to take advantage of this new technology and capability,
we need VIP.
We need VIP to do this within all the business processes
because VIP is so foundational to the core operations,
whether you're a distributor,
whether you're on the supplier side looking at your inventory and depletions.
And so that's where we took it upon ourselves to say,
let's look at the marketplace.
Let's look at all the different providers out there and take a hard look at ourselves.
And we made the decision to make a really sizable significant investment into a new architecture
with AI and an agentech first decision.
And what that allows us to do is actually create not just agents and AI on top of legacy products,
which again, that still adds some value, but it doesn't change the game.
And so we said, let's go down the path of actually building for the next several years,
not for the next two months or three months because the new models have perceived something,
but we need to have a new foundation.
So VIPs made the biggest investment or one of the biggest investments we've ever made as a company.
And that's going to allow us to have an agentech first platform
bring in many different types of data and create agents on top that again,
aren't just giving you some insights,
but I like to say are doing work.
They're doing work for you as a supplier.
They're actually making decisions on your behalf within certain guardrails.
And then they're able to communicate for you if you're a supplier.
Actually having these agents do work for you communicate to your distributors to your trading partners
on your behalf.
Again, I go back to my first point.
Everyone needs more arms and hands, right?
You never have enough people when you're a small player or a large player.
And so actually being able to do some of that work,
communicate digitally to distributors whether it's pricing,
whether it's something related to inventory, whether it's shipments.
And likewise, distributors having agents that can interpret and engage
and make decisions on their behalf and then communicate to their trading partners.
That's where we're going as VIP with AI.
We think we play a really central role into that core operational element of how the three
tier system works.
But we were also cognizant that that takes real investment.
It's not just lipstick on an existing product and putting in a chatbot and saying,
"Oh, everything's AI."
It's really looking at the foundation of what's needed.
So much has changed just in the last six months,
where whether you're a software or data company,
what you had built maybe two years ago, you were in 12 months ago,
almost becomes irrelevant from an architectural standpoint just because the last six months.
So that level investment is something we're fully driving towards and
working with a lot of clients and both the distributor and supplier side of how we bring this new
platform to life.
And at the same time, though, we're still investing in our existing products.
That is not stopping.
So I think of it from a VIP standpoint as we're going down both paths.
We're investing in existing products,
putting AI on top, kind of what I was mentioning with many others in the industry.
But we're also going after this whole new architecture and whole new platform and that's what's really
required long term of the free-tier system.
Whenever I talk to founders, operators, about who are they to use their partners,
it really comes down to trust.
And I think when you're talking about AI and the evolution of this technology,
it's really important to trust your partner.
And it seems like the level of expertise that you guys can provide to companies is just unmatched
at this point.
So I highly encourage folks to get in touch with the team at VIP.
Lucinda, what's the best way to do so?
Yeah, thanks, Ray.
We are so excited to hear from all our customers.
We're getting questions every day and I do think the best way to reach out to us is
VIPinsights.com and go and submit a form, request a demo, send in a question,
and we will be able to get back to.
But our sales team is talking with all our customers all day every day about this.
And we're really excited to bring everyone more.
Outstanding. Well, Andrew, Lucinda, thank you so much for taking the time.
I'm really excited for the future of AI and VIP's ability to help companies
address this technology in a really effective way.
So thanks again and let's definitely stay in touch.
Great, thanks for having us, Ray.
Thank you, Ray.
