We’re creating a business where our operations are smarter, our decisions faster and our customers more satisfied. Mike Webster, DCC’s Head of Digital Innovation, tells how
Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the leading economic drivers of our time and is already beginning to transform the way that companies do business. As a group that creates value by buying and scaling entrepreneurial businesses, DCC sees huge opportunities for using AI-led digital innovation to help it grow.
Inspired by the potential, DCC has developed a group-wide AI ecosystem that delivers practical, actionable value in the day-to-day running of the business. The aim was to build a system that all DCC business units could access without needing to hire specialist data science teams or develop their own. Last year, after extensive testing, DCC took a bold leap and began the first rollouts, starting with a handful of businesses in the UK and Europe, followed by DCC Propane in the US.
DCC’s culture of knowledge-sharing and continuous improvement
“The first thing to know is that this is initially an applied AI approach, a large neutral network, trained on broad data at scale, that can be adapted to a wide range of tasks,” says Mike Webster, Head of Digital Innovation at DCC. “The AI platform has infinite capacity to learn across the rich seam of data that DCC possesses. As AI becomes more agentic, we have the data platforms in place to readily utilise the new wave of innovations.”
“This platform applies reusable machine learning (ML) to process vast amounts of data with multiple attributes – think three-dimensional data, spot patterns within it and use those to make predictions faster than a human ever could,” he says.
In practice, this means a sales team can use AI to identify the customers most likely to churn and take steps to retain them. Procurement can get the best prices when they can better predict nuances in demand. Finding efficiencies in warehousing and distribution, mitigating supply-chain shocks – the insight into behaviour that AI provides enables businesses to run smarter operations and offer an all-round better customer service too.
The unique advantage of DCC’s approach lies in the centralisation of this technology. “It works on a hub-and-spoke arrangement: our businesses can access the platform and keep control of their data, while the business-specific AI models learn from every interaction and that learning feeds back to the hub, enabling the core AI system to become continually smarter,” says Mike. “And because these models and the AI platform are DCC’s intellectual property, we control them and can set the ethical framework they operate within,” he adds. This is important, given concerns around the inherent risks of AI, from hidden bias to data misuse.
Bridging the AI trust gap
Studies have shown that a cultural and organisational readiness to embrace AI is as important as investment in the technology itself. To allay any fears around job losses, rollout teams are deliberate about showing how AI is a tool that will help people with their jobs, not replace them.
DCC’s first AI rollouts – each of which takes only 12 weeks – started in its Healthcare division, with Wales-based primary care business Williams Medical Supplies.
“Before we did anything, we met with everyone in all the different areas of the business – procurement, purchasing, call centre and sales – and explained that this was their project,” says Mike.
“We showed the sales team, for example, how combining their expertise and skills with AI’s ability to understand the relationship between all 30,000 of their products in real time could help them explore new revenue streams, identify their most loyal customers and how to market to them, cross-sell and make their lives better in multiple ways.”
New roles have since emerged for people who were involved in the rollout and are now AI performance leads. “AI creates a new type of organisation. One that has AI at its core creates more opportunities, without a shadow of a doubt,” Mike adds. “AI drives growth and it drives opportunities for people,” he says. “That’s important because these projects are deeply human.”
