PepsiCo’s AI Marketing Review Keeps the Stack In-House

PepsiCo has opened a global AI marketing review that puts Omnicom, Accenture, Deloitte, and Publicis Sapient in the same room. The brief covers how the food and drink company will build and run AI across marketing, from content to measurement. It lands on a company that already told vendors the core process stays in-house, and that just handed global media to Publicis without a pitch.

The assignment is not a Super Bowl creative contest. It is a fight over who gets to sit next to a stack PepsiCo has been assembling for years, while advertising and other marketing in 2025 still ran at $5.4 billion, including $3.4 billion in advertising expense, on $93.9 billion of net revenue.

PepsiCo Is Shopping for Help It Already Hired

By August 17, 2026, the company was vetting a mix of holding-company talent and consulting firms for a sweep across content, data, personalisation, and automation. Chief executive Ramon Laguarta had told analysts in February that five years of spending on data, cloud, and related systems had prepared PepsiCo to move faster on customer ordering, demand forecasts, factory models, consumer insight, content, and personalised communications.

That is the opposite of a blank page. Dr. Athina Kanioura, who is chief strategy and transformation officer and CEO of Latin America Foods, has been the public owner of the build. At Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference on October 14, 2025, she described an agentic rollout through sales, service, marketing, and the field, and she set a goal of being agentic in every part of the business by the end of 2026.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The brief: The live assignment is an AI marketing rebuild, not a single-brand creative pitch.
• The spend: PepsiCo recorded $5.4 billion of advertising and other marketing in 2025, down from $5.9 billion in 2024, with advertising expense at $3.4 billion against $3.9 billion.
• The media layer: Publicis became exclusive lead global media partner on September 2, 2026, without a formal pitch, on $1.7 billion of 2025 media tracked by COMvergence.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The winner: No firm has been named on the AI transformation brief.
• The fee and date: PepsiCo has not published a budget, a decision date, or a full statement of work.
• Omnicom’s seat: It is not public whether Omnicom remains in the AI process after losing global media.

Those gaps are why holding companies still show up. They also explain why a win may buy implementation hours, not ownership of the operating system.

Who Is Pitching the AI Marketing Brief?

The named contestants sit in two camps. Omnicom and Publicis Sapient come from advertising groups. Accenture and Deloitte come from consulting firms that already sell multi-year AI installs to the same C-suite. Agencies on the brief still have to show they can run an AI marketing platform.

WHO ALREADY SITS ON THE STACK

Publicis now holds a structural edge its rivals do not. Sapient is in the AI pitch while its parent just won the media, identity, and technology layer that any marketing OS has to plug into. Accenture and Deloitte bring the opposite claim: they can rewire processes without needing the media account.

Kanioura Drew a Hard Line at Dreamforce

The review would read as a standard bake-off if PepsiCo had not already said who owns the work. Kanioura’s line at Dreamforce was not about a pilot. She said the company wants to own its core AI-augmented processes and will not outsource them, and that the operating system should sit with PepsiCo people rather than a third party.

We will be agentic in every part of the business by the end of 2026.

Athina Kanioura, chief strategy and transformation officer, PepsiCo, at Salesforce Dreamforce

She also told vendors a second rule. PepsiCo buys products, she said, and it is not interested if it cannot influence the roadmap. That stance already shapes work with Salesforce, AWS, Microsoft, ServiceNow, Nvidia, and Siemens. The company collapsed about 50 data lakes into one global foundation, runs a multi-cloud setup on AWS and Azure with Google Cloud joining, uses Databricks for analytics, and built a homegrown application layer called DSX so markets share one fabric.

On April 22, 2026, PepsiCo announced a multi-year collaboration with Google Cloud to put Gemini Enterprise into supply chain and go-to-market work, on top of that same multi-cloud plan. Kanioura said the pact is about how PepsiCo brings products to market and how it makes decisions at scale. Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, tied the deal to putting AI in the hands of the global workforce.

She quantified the Salesforce side at Dreamforce as well. Agentforce was in more than 1.5 million stores, with a 2026 target of 50 million, starting with small retailers, and she cited 25 to 30 percent efficiency from agentic AI. A pitcher who treats that as a greenfield install is selling past the customer.

The Media Account Moved Before the Review Ended

Sixteen days after the AI review became public, PepsiCo solved a different, larger piece of the same puzzle. Publicis was named exclusive lead global media partner across more than 200 markets, folding strategy, planning, activation, connected identity, data, and technology into a model the company calls One PepsiCo. There was no competitive pitch.

Omnicom’s OMD network had led media in the United States and the United Kingdom for more than two decades, and the wider Omnicom relationship went back at least three decades. Omnicom shares fell 5% on the session and closed at $81.76. Analysts at Barclays put the annual fee hit around $100 million. An Omnicom spokesperson said that after an extraordinarily long and successful partnership, PepsiCo had decided to move its media business elsewhere. PepsiCo said Omnicom remains a “critical strategic partner” on creative, sports, and public relations briefs through shops including BBDO, TBWA, and Goodby Silverstein.

PEPSICO’S AI AND AGENCY CALENDAR

1. 2018 to 2024: Foods in-house unit D3 grows from one full-time person into an about 140-person shop under chief creative officer Chris Bellinger.
2. June 16, 2025: U.S. beverages deepens a co-sourced team with VaynerMedia on Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Starry, Mug, and Bubly.
3. October 14, 2025: Kanioura tells Dreamforce PepsiCo will be agentic across the business by the end of 2026 and will not outsource core AI processes.
4. March 2026: Josep Hernández, vice president of media for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, publishes PepsiCo’s live AI media tests on YouTube, Lay’s, and Doritos.
5. April 22, 2026: PepsiCo and Google Cloud announce the Gemini Enterprise pact.
6. August 17, 2026: The AI marketing transformation review is underway with Omnicom, Accenture, Deloitte, and Publicis Sapient in the process.
7. September 2, 2026: Publicis takes global media without a pitch and is tasked with an AI- and data-driven One PepsiCo model.

Long retainers are already weaker than a single identity and data layer. PepsiCo showed that on September 2, before anyone had won the AI brief. The open question is how much room is left for a second partner to own “transformation” once media, identity, and the cloud contracts are spoken for.

Everyday Ads Already Come From Inside

The review’s other hidden party is the work that never went out to a holding company in the first place. D3 was built as a digital execution house and, Bellinger has said, now operates as a full-service creative shop that has to earn briefs the way an outside agency would. No brand team is forced to use it.

U.S. beverages took a different path. Mark Kirkham, CMO of PepsiCo Beverages U.S., has described the VaynerMedia setup as co-sourcing rather than a clean in-house or outsource choice, with shared KPIs and faster briefing. Since that joint team started, he said, content output has tripled and engagement has jumped between 50% and 70% depending on the brand, across Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and Starry among others. Big brand moments still go to other agencies.

EMEA media is already running the connected version of the same idea. Hernández has argued that scattered generative pilots are “islands of innovation,” and that PepsiCo needed a continent that runs from first touch to sale. The tests are specific, not slogans.

PEPSICO’S LIVE AI TESTS

A Poland Lay’s pilot is using prior brand-lift and performance data to score creative before it ships. Jane Wakely, chief consumer and marketing officer, still credits agency partners on attention-grabbing films, then points past the spot to the system around it. The system is what the August brief is shopping for, and large parts of it are already in production.

What Other CPG Companies Are Bringing In-House

PepsiCo is not writing this script alone. Boston Consulting Group’s 2026 survey of 100 CPG marketing leaders at U.S. and European firms with at least $1 billion in revenue found a wide gap between hope and habit. Seventy percent expect generative AI to help marketing work faster. Thirteen percent say it is in widespread use or fully stitched into workflows.

THE CPG SHIFT INSIDE MARKETING

• The gap: Seven in ten leaders expect speed from generative AI, while 13% say it is actually integrated.
• The structure: Nearly 60% are centralising marketing for scale, and nearly 50% of that same group are also pushing work closer to local markets.
• The take-back: Leaders expect to pull in content and creative, insights and analytics, and retail media, the jobs most exposed to generative tools.
• The yield: One CPG in the benchmark cut time on key workflows by 25% to 40%, got products to market twice as fast, and saw 90% of users satisfied with the drop in admin.

That is the brief’s real competition, and it is not another logo on a credentials slide. Global teams keep the models and the guardrails. Local teams make the line that sounds Dutch or Belgian. The regional marketing layer in the middle gets thinner. Publicis Sapient has published its own rebuild, recutting more than 1,200 marketing tasks and cutting campaign launch time from 20 days to three to five, with human labour per campaign falling from 100 hours to 14. That is the product consulting firms walk in with. It is also work PepsiCo’s own media and in-house teams are already doing in pieces.

A consistent global brand still has to sound local, which is why Hernández’s Benelux lines existed at all. The partner that wins will be asked to connect those local outputs to one identity graph, not to replace the people who already make them.

A Win That Does Not Include the Operating System

The useful way to read the review is as a staffing decision on top of a stack that already has owners. Kanioura’s office holds process. Google Cloud and Salesforce hold the models and the agents. D3 and the VaynerMedia joint team hold everyday content. Publicis now holds global media, identity, and the technology wrapping around paid, earned, and shared channels. Omnicom still holds a creative, sports, and PR relationship that survived a 24-year media run.

Accenture or Deloitte can still be hired to stitch workflows, train teams, and retire duplicate tools. Sapient can still be hired to industrialise production next to its parent’s new media model. Omnicom can still be hired to feed the same OS from the creative side. None of those mandates, on the evidence PepsiCo has already put on stage, includes taking the operating system home.

The company will name a partner when it is ready. The people who already run the process have names on the org chart, vendor contracts dated April 22 and October 14, and live ads in Benelux and the U.K. that do not wait on a pitch.