Hershey and AI – summary
- Hershey AI rollout focused on robust backend systems
- Agentic AI analyses hundreds of thousands of marketing inputs
- Real-time insights guide advertising spend amid changing macroenvironment
- AI shifts confectionery decisions from historical data to live signals
- Industry wide AI enables faster innovation efficiency and competitive advantage
The Hershey Company has, by its own admission, been cautious in its use of AI, particularly when it comes to marketing.
Why?
“Because we know that the output of AI can look impressive. But if you don’t put the time and resources into the back-end capabilities, none of it works,” says Vinny Rinaldi, vice president of consumer connections at Hershey.
But that’s all set to change, with the launch of the confectionery giant’s new AI-powered systems. As of this month, Hershey has the ability to make fast, informed decisions about where advertising dollars go, “based on what’s actually happening” in the market rather than what happened in the past.
Hershey’s AI-powered marketing
The maker of major brands, including Reese’s Pieces and Twizzlers, has created its own AI system to “ingest and analyse hundreds of thousands of marketing inputs” provided with a partnering analytics platform.
The platform pulls data from places like social media, search engines, and streaming services. This is then fed into an agentic-AI-powered platform, giving Hershey ”visibility" into all of its sales data.
“That’s how I start every day,” says Hershey’s Rinaldi. “Enquiring about things like: What are my best and worst performing channels? Where should I move my dollars? What’s driving revenue? It gives me the answers immediately and takes in the context of the current macroenvironment.”
The approach reflects a wider shift towards using AI as an operational backbone rather than a surface-level tool. By linking data sources and analysing performance continuously, the system enables quicker responses to market movements and changing consumer behaviour.
In practice, this means less reliance on retrospective reporting and more emphasis on day-to-day optimisation, with AI helping teams prioritise resources, identify opportunities and make decisions grounded in current conditions rather than historical trends.
Turning data into decisions
As Hershey’s experience shows, the real power of AI in confectionery is not flashier campaigns or novelty tools, but the ability to connect vast, previously siloed data sets and turn them into action at speed.
And marketing’s just one of its many uses.
Across the sector, companies are using AI to optimise formulations, predict demand spikes around seasonal events, reduce waste, sharpen pricing strategies and better anticipate shifts in consumer sentiment – all critical in a category facing inflationary pressure and rapidly changing tastes.
What makes this moment different is scale. Large confectioners now have the data infrastructure to apply AI end to end – from cocoa sourcing and factory efficiency to shelf placement and personalisation.
Smaller players, meanwhile, are accessing similar capabilities through off-the-shelf platforms, lowering the barrier to entry for smarter decision-making. The result is an industry that can respond in near real-time rather than relying on historical assumptions.
Handled responsibly, AI offers confectionery companies a way to be both more creative and more commercially disciplined, freeing teams to focus on innovation while machines handle complexity.
What’s more, says Rinaldi, AI will “continue accelerating the pace of change”.
