NDA spoke to Benjamin Lickfett, Global VP Breakthrough Innovation – Digital & Ventures at Diageo, ahead of his appearance at Foresight on 12 September 2024.
Lickfett boasts more than 20 years of experience leveraging emerging technologies to deliver growth for Fortune 500 companies and startups. Before joining Diageo, he co-founded several start-up ventures and consulted the likes of Hilton, Visa, ExxonMobil, Cartier, Best Buy, and JP Morgan on their brand and growth strategies.
Has 2024 played out the way you expected for the industry?
I’ve given up trying to predict what’s going to happen. I was expecting that the topic of AI would continue to pick up momentum. But there’s more energy, more fragmentation, faster acceleration than I would have predicted. It’s exciting to see, but also complex to navigate.
With everything else, I think it continues to be a world of more volatility. We’ve come to expect volatility, but it’s very tough to predict how exactly that manifests itself.
What developments/innovations has Diageo focused on this year?
We see rapidly shifting external alignment in terms of technologies and consumer behaviours. So, we launched an AI-based personalisation platform with Johnnie Walker, for example. It allows customers to use AI to create their own label. We essentially trained an AI on the Johnnie Walker brand world, and collaborated with an artist, to allow that real-time engagement. That shift in the relationship with the consumer and the expectations around truly meaningful personalisation; there’s a lot happening there, so that’s one area we’re looking at.
Equally, for a brand like Seedlip, we launched a conversational AI interface with the idea that search or traditional navigation is quite broken. Consumers still don’t get what they really want, so using technology like AI to help really understand the intent and give really relevant information – no matter if that’s around food pairing or product information or cocktail recommendations.
We’re still, as always, continuing on trying to understand how we create more impactful, relevant consumer journeys. That’s in addition to a lot of work that some of my colleagues are leading in areas like sustainability, to understand alternative materials and how we can further change the industry for the better.
What has been the most exciting development outside of Diageo?
I’m fascinated by some of the breakthroughs in bioscience and biotech that continue. There a convergence on a couple of things – from Quantum computing to AI. Some of the bigger breakthroughs are in protein sequencing.
Some of the advances being made in long-tail disease prevention is fantastic and absolutely mind-boggling. I think the amount of data through wearables and IoT that companies can use to understand that is fascinating – the advancements and longevity in that. It’s an area that really excites me too.
Foresight 2024
Fancy looking ahead to 2025 with Diageo and brands such as Coca-Cola, Hilton, and Boots, to name a few? Join us in London on 12 September 2024!
What exciting plans does Diageo have for 2025?
I work in the breakthrough team, so we’re specifically looking at these transformative opportunities where we might not currently have the capabilities and where there’s this big shift in consumer behaviour.
One exciting trend is around how consumers think about belonging and their own identity and how they feel part of very different communities than they might have done in the past. So, one of the things we’re quite interested in is seeing how we can facilitate and build these communities. For example, we recently launched our first-ever, blockchain-based cask programme for tequila, where people could purchase a cask of tequila and determine how that’s aged. We’re really interested in how we can use technology to bring communities together.
Ultimately, the idea is all around enabling people to celebrate. And that’s just shifting the way you can do that over distance, and how you make that more inclusive, and give more power to these communities to co-create products and shape that.
What are your industry-wide predictions for 2025?
We’re going to see continued awareness, or sensitivity, in consumers around where they spend their money. They’re really conscious about creating meaningful experiences, especially when it comes to the area of luxury. There is more of a demand that consumers expect a brand to take them seriously, to establish meaningful trust, and to be truthful to that. So, I think there really needs to be more effort from the brand side to understand real consumer friction or pain points, and really deliver against that. That’s going to accelerate further with consumers having more information at their fingertips and just those higher expectations. So, I think that will be something that will continue. In a pretty tough environment, we really need to delight and amaze consumers and really win their trust.
