The Beverage Leader’s Playbook for Rolling Out Agentic AI Across Your Team
Over the last four weeks of this blog series, we’ve explored how agentic AI is transforming the beverage industry. We’ve seen how digital coworkers rescue finance teams from the month-end grind, elevate sales reps into strategic consultants, and help operations managers optimize routes based on historical data.
But even the most powerful technology in the world will falter if your team doesn't know how to use it effectively or hesitates to adopt it. As the VP of Technology at Encompass with over 13 years of beverage tech experience, I can attest that a solid change management strategy is crucial.
In fact, before you roll anything out, it's worth reviewing your overall AI strategy: identifying where AI can help most with time-consuming manual workflows, aligning it to your business priorities, appointing team leads to champion adoption within their departments, and more. That strategy sets a great foundation and fuels the confidence you’ll have bringing your team along with it. With that, here’s a rollout playbook for successfully maximizing your team's ability to fully embrace and work alongside their digital coworkers.
1. Raise Your Expectations on What Agentic AI Can Do For You
When most of us picture AI at work, we picture something pretty modest: asking it to remind you about a task, prompting it for a simple answer here and there, or maybe having it provide a summary of that long email thread you didn't have time to read. Helpful? Sure. But that's the shallow end of the pool. The value you get from AI is determined by the way you think about it.
We ought to raise our expectations on what agentic AI can do. It's more than being an assistant, it’s a smart coworker. That’s where the real value and ROI lies. The payoff is tangible: it's hours back in your team's week, margins you stop leaking to stale prices and missed short pays, and your best people spending their day on judgment calls instead of data entry.
I encourage you to be bold. Take the request farther than you're used to by asking for the outcome instead of the input you were going to do yourself:
Changing that mindset is the first, and most important, step toward full adoption.
2. Change the Language: Scale Capacity, Not Headcount
While some teammates may embrace the use of AI, you may have others more concerned with job security. Your rollout must change this narrative. You're not deploying "bots" to replace your workforce. Rather, you are hiring "digital coworkers" to eliminate your team’s administrative drag for higher strategic work.
Of course, that reassurance holds up if you've chosen an agentic solution built with human-in-the-loop approvals, so it's worth getting this right before you roll anything out. Some solutions in the market simply prompt their agents to ask for permission before executing work, but that’s an insidious danger you need to be aware of. An agent that's only told to ask permission can talk itself out of asking. A good agentic solution instead builds that checkpoint into the codebase of the platform itself (not the agent’s instructions), so the agent pushes toward completing your request, stops before it executes, and won't commit until it gets a human "yes."
Once you’ve chosen the platform with the right human approval structure, walk your team through exactly how these would work in the platform. For instance, it'll stage the complex table edit, draft the customer email, or propose the mid-day route change, but the human always reviews the "Before & After" and clicks approve.
That’s the reassurance your skeptical team members need. The goal of a built-for-beverage AI is to scale your operational capacity without scaling headcount just to "manage the system." You show your team the AI is here to protect their time, not take their roles.
3. Train the Agentic Platform on Your Reality
Generic AI fails because it doesn't know how your specific warehouse operates. A successful rollout requires treating your new digital coworker like a new human hire: it needs to learn your Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). You need to give it the context it should be operating in.
If your platform is engaging in an automatic, nightly background learning process, then it’s securely indexing your company's specific SOP documents, learning from the daily chats it had with your staff, and acquiring company-specific skills. This makes the agent smarter every day and drastically reduces the "single-point-of-failure" risk that occurs when your ERP expert goes on vacation.
You also don’t need to wait until your SOPs are clean and documented to hand the agent a finished playbook. Your team's daily use is what generates the missing documentation, and every night you're live is a night the agent gets closer to how your business actually runs. The distributor who adopts Agentic AI this quarter has a season of context behind them by the time the one waiting for perfection has finished writing the manual.
In an AI-world, the Advantage is Always Human
A lot can be said about how great AI is, but let’s not forget that even in a rapidly progressing AI era, the real advantage is always human.
Your people know the business inside and out, understand the industry nuances and direction, and are the ones building skills for AI to execute on. They have great relationships within the beverage industry, which always has and always will be, a relationship-based business. AI cannot taste a new vintage, negotiate a handshake deal with a retailer, or navigate a forklift through a crowded warehouse.
Here's what I keep coming back to. AI is only as good as the people teaching it. Your leadership and your workforce are the lever, the platform is the fulcrum. It’s only effective when used to its full potential, which means the ROI comes from engaging with it. Set that fulcrum well and your best people can do what they do best: build relationships, drive strategy, and own the market.
