Digital And Tech Chief On How General Mills Is Scaling AI

General Mills is one of the most widely recognized food companies in the world with products that appear in roughly 90 percent of American households and revenue of $19.5 billion in fiscal 2025. The company spans four operating segments

• North America Retail
• North America Foodservice
• International
• Pet

These segments are supported by a broad portfolio that ranges from Cheerios and Nature Valley to Old El Paso and the rapidly growing Blue Buffalo brand.

To help the company thrive in a market defined by shifting consumer expectations, expanding digital channels and rising data opportunities, General Mills created the role of Chief Digital and Technology Officer. For nearly six years, that responsibility has belonged to Jaime Montemayor, who leads an organization that integrates IT, cybersecurity, data and analytics and digital product capabilities to drive enterprise transformation.

Building a New Digital Operating Model

Montemayor joined the company as it launched its Accelerate strategy, which required a more integrated approach to technology. His mandate was to bring together mature technology and security functions and augment them with modern data, analytics and AI capabilities. “The objective was to bring together known and mature capabilities,” he underscored, “and augment that with a new capability focused on the use of data, analytics and AI to create advantage solutions for the organization.”

His team is arranged around a hybrid engagement and delivery model. An engagement layer works closely with segment and functional leaders to identify opportunities. Platform teams create enterprise-wide capabilities, while product teams embed deeply with the business to deliver solutions built for scalability. This structure ensures proximity to commercial needs and accelerates the lift-and-shift of innovations across markets and categories.

Establishing the Foundations of Cloud, Data and Talent

Montemayor began just three weeks before the pandemic, which intensified the urgency to modernize. He focused the team on three foundational domains:

• Technology
• Governance
• Talent

The first move was shifting from traditional data centers to the cloud, enabling the speed and flexibility required for transformation. The team then built a connected data foundation starting in the commercial functions and expanding into supply chain and other area which made it possible to deploy advanced analytics rapidly and at scale.

The third foundation was talent. General Mills built global engineering capabilities across data, cloud and AI. “Our engineering teams are awesome,” he said with pride. “We have amazing data engineering, cloud engineering and AI engineering teams operating in a global model.”

Delivering Value with AI

With this groundwork in place, General Mills is moving from descriptive and predictive analytics toward prescriptive capabilities powered by generative and agentic AI.

One example comes from the supply chain. Walmart, the company’s largest customer, required roughly 80 hours per week of manual demand management work. By integrating General Mills’ logistics optimization models with Walmart’s Luminate platform, the companies automated the workflow. What once required 80 hours now takes less than 30 minutes per week. This capability is now being replicated with additional customers.

In R&D, AI accelerates visualization and concept testing with consumers. On production lines, machine learning models predict waste and optimize throughput, reducing downtime and improving yields. These innovations collectively shorten innovation cycles and enhance operational performance.

E-commerce is another focus. General Mills has built an AI engine that analyzes search performance, assortment, content and consumer reviews across digital retailers, identifying opportunities in real time. “We want to win the search battle in every click,” Montemayor highlighted. The scanner capability that powers this approach is now being scaled globally and enhanced with generative and agentic AI.

Relative to agentic AI, Montemayor sees as a major strategic shift. He believes General Mills is well positioned because of its disciplined approach to clean data and governance. “As we deploy the new agentic architecture framework, we can quickly apply these new capabilities to our data foundation,” he said.

Bringing the Organization Along

Montemayor stresses that none of this progress is purely technological. Trust, partnership and education are essential. “Everything we do starts with a business opportunity or a business need,” he noted. “We rarely talk about tech for tech’s sake.”

He created joint business-and-technology summits with major strategic partners to expose leaders to emerging capabilities. He also works with venture capital firms to understand new trends and experiment with early-stage solutions. Change management requires “a solid engagement process followed by solutions that solve real business problems,” he explained.

Marketing Reinvented as Performance Marketing

Much of the team’s current focus is in marketing, where rapid evolution is underway as retailers build their own digital media networks. General Mills is responding with a connected data foundation and advanced AI capabilities that bridge audience identification, content dissemination and campaign optimization.

Machine learning helps identify the right audiences, and near–real-time models assess campaign effectiveness. “We no longer want to talk about marketing,” Montemayor clarified. “We now talk about performance marketing.”

A Playbook for Transformation

Montemayor’s tenure reflects a multi-year modernization journey rooted in cloud, clean data, governance and talent. That foundation now enables AI-driven transformation at scale. The result is a digital and technology function that has evolved from support organization to growth engine providing speed to market, powerful insights and the capabilities necessary to meet the next wave of consumer demand.

Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written three bestselling books, including his latest Getting to Nimble. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.