Carbery Group  is a global food and ingredients company formed from a joint venture between creameries and Express Dairies in 1965. Operating across eight countries, it holds market-leading positions in dairy, ingredients, and flavors. Carbery, with a co-operative heritage, is committed to delivering sustainable value for farmer shareholders. Focused on enriching lives through healthier foods, the company emphasizes quality, collaboration, talent development, and sustainability. It supplies premium, sustainable dairy ingredients globally, aligning with its mission to create lasting value while maintaining a dedication to service, integrity, and innovation.

In the highly demanding dairy industry, Carbery recognise the need for reliable and accessible insights for their commercial team, helping them to make decisions on their customer base and sales pipeline. They took the proactive approach to re-think their CRM data interface, which is currently difficult to access, especially on a case-by-case basis. The team wanted to consider a chat-based interface to their extensive CRM data, allowing users to more readily query the platform to gain customer insights.

In the highly demanding dairy industry, Carbery recognise the need for reliable and accessible insights for their commercial team, helping them to make decisions on their customer base and sales pipeline. The customer brought in Spark as a innovation partner to leverage our expertise in evaluating AI solution options to enhance decision making. The project focused on the feasibility of a natural language interface to the Carbery CRM platform (Microsoft Dynamics). Spark’s involvement allowed the Carbery team to build an AI prototype and then estimate the time and effort required to deploy a solution in production. The process also served to highlight potential risks in pursuing an AI-based solution.

When Carbery embarked on the project, they were initially unfamiliar with harnessing AI to enhance their operations. While they had experimented with ChatGPT and found it intriguing, they were unsure about its applicability to their CRM system. Spark's role resembled that of an R&D partner, shedding light on potential avenues for innovation, while also outlining associated limitations and risks. Through this collaboration, it became evident that implementing ChatGPT-like systems required a more substantial integration effort than initially anticipated, emphasising the importance of clearly defining success criteria from the outset. Although Carbery opted not to proceed with a full Production deployment at this juncture, based on their learnings through the POC process, the groundwork laid by Spark has paved the way for future AI exploration and innovation within Carbery's organisation.