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KEYWORDS: Industrial AI, PepsiCo, Industrial Data Fabrics, Industrial Metaverse, Digital Twins, ARC Industry Forum
Overview
The 30th Annual ARC Industry Leadership Forum was recently held in Orlando from February 9-12. The focus of this year’s Forum was Industrial AI, specifically how end users can achieve business value and adopt the best practices of industry leaders. “Pacesetter” organizations, roughly the top tier of industrial companies, are treating AI as a core operational capability rather than an IT experiment. PepsiCo’s scale, unified data foundation, and deep internal talent base illustrate how fragmented data and skills shortages can be overcome to enable AI-driven decision making across global manufacturing and supply chains.
This shift is being realized through Agentic AI, digital twins, and a hybrid human–AI workforce. PepsiCo’s use of multi-agent systems, intelligent vision, and industrial metaverse simulations demonstrates tangible ROI, including capital reduction and operational optimization, while reframing AI as a tool for augmenting workers rather than replacing them.
The PepsiCo Blueprint: What an Industrial AI Pacesetter Looks Like in 2026
If there was one overarching theme at the 30th Annual ARC Industry Leadership Forum in Orlando earlier this month, it was this: the era of "pilot purgatory" is officially over for the market leaders. We are now firmly operating in what I’ve been calling the Schism of Speed.
As we detailed in our Industrial AI Pacesetters 2026 Report and the Q4 2025 Industrial AI, Energy, and Robotics Survey, the market has irrevocably fractured. The top 13 percent of industrial organizations—the Pacesetters—have stopped treating Artificial Intelligence as a siloed IT experiment and have weaponized it as a core operational strategy.
As I sat listening to the opening keynote by Ashin Parikh, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Transformation, Global Supply Chain and Ops at PepsiCo, I realized the audience was getting a masterclass in exactly what this "Pacesetter" DNA looks like in the wild.
Later in the day, I had the privilege of moderating an executive panel featuring Ashin alongside Chase Christensen of Jabil, Steve Blackwell of AWS, Chad Wright from Boston Dynamics, and Axel Lorenz from Siemens. But before I dive into the panel insights in a future post, I want to unpack the PepsiCo keynote, because it perfectly validated the aggregate data we’ve been tracking at ARC.
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