How can companies achieve a real return on technology investment? How can AI agents support commercial teams? And how are leading food and beverage brands transforming their Away-from-Home channel? On 11 June, a new edition of UVE Day was held: an event hosted by UVE Solutions to bring together clients and professionals from the consumer packaged goods (CPG/FMCG) sector, which over the years has become a key industry event.
Eurostars Sitges, in Barcelona, provided the setting for a day featuring several talks, a panel discussion, live technology demonstrations, and opportunities for networking and leisure. ‘The aim of UVE Day is to learn, discover, network and have fun. I hope that is what happened,’ said Pep Planas, General Manager of UVE Solutions, addressing the nearly 100 people gathered at the event.
Hosted by Sara Escudero, a renowned actress, comedian and presenter, the event opened with welcome remarks from Jordi Vila, CEO of UVE Solutions, who thanked attendees for joining and presented the full programme for the day, which ran from 10 o’clock in the morning until almost 8 o’clock in the evening.
Why collaborate with SaaS companies?
After the welcome, it was time for the first talk, entitled ‘SaaS in the age of AI’. In it, Pep Planas reflected on the value that software-as-a-service companies currently bring, and will continue to bring in the future, in response to a number of press headlines and social media posts suggesting that they may disappear as a result of artificial intelligence. ‘SaaS is not dead, but it has to transform alongside AI. When you buy SaaS, you buy a platform, you buy specialised and accumulated knowledge of a specific sector, you buy contractual responsibility, you buy functionality,’ Planas argued.
During his presentation, he shared some of the conclusions from The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, a study from the MIT NANDA project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published in July 2025. The study reports that 95% of generative AI pilot projects in companies never reach production or have a measurable impact on the P&L, mainly due to the knowledge gap. It also states that tools purchased from specialist vendors are twice as successful as those developed internally. ‘When everyone builds, no one governs. Lines of code have never been so cheap, while expertise and accountability have never been so valuable,’ he observed.
From sell-in to sell-out: the Dr. Oetker case
The next talk was given by Xavier Costa, Executive Head of Away from Home Spain at Dr. Oetker, one of Europe’s leading food and beverage groups. Its business in Spain celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2025 and, today, the Away from Home area generates millions of euros in revenue: 70% from foodservice and 30% from shops and supermarkets. During his presentation, Costa explained the change of model they are applying to their route-to-market strategy, based on collaboration with distributors. ‘We were growing in foodservice through distributors, but with limited visibility over execution and the real power of the channel.’
‘Now, with UVE’s help, we are moving towards a collaborative growth model with distributors, sharing common objectives, business plans and performance tracking,’ he explained. This shift from a sell-in to a sell-out strategy, which already covers 40% of their market, is allowing them to achieve full outlet visibility, with tangible results such as increased spend per customer and a significant rise in the repeat rate among new accounts. ‘The UVE platform has a major impact on outlet prospecting: we now take around one month, whereas in previous companies I could spend between six and eight months on this process,’ Costa said with satisfaction.
Turning technology into measurable commercial impact
The morning agenda concluded with the Solutions Experience Corners and a panel discussion on how to maximise the return on technology investment and how to prepare an organisation for it. Entitled ‘Turning technology into a commercial competitive advantage’, the session featured three professionals from leading companies in the CPG sector: Pablo Guerendiain (Coca-Cola Europacific Partners), Alberto Arias (Unilever Food Solutions) and Fermín Robles (Pernod Ricard), moderated by Thomas Petit, Director of Transformation at UVE Solutions.
The three experts converged on the same message: maximising the return on technology investment depends less on the tool itself than on linking it to a measurable outcome, ensuring real adoption, safeguarding data credibility and governance, and understanding artificial intelligence as an amplifier of human talent.
Guerendiain, Omni-Contact Operations & RTM Development Director at Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, focused on the disconnect that so often weighs down projects. ‘Technology is not always designed to generate impact, and very often it is treated as a must-have rather than as something that has to be linked to how you achieve an outcome,’ he warned, stressing the need to build robust business cases and, above all, to measure them. Looking ahead, he advocated an omni-contact route-to-market model combining physical visits with virtual meetings, and positioned artificial intelligence as an amplifier. ‘For AI to have an amplifying effect, it must be properly guided and controlled, and this should not depend on the sales force, but on a strong back-office department.’
Arias, Lead of Data, Digital Transformation and Customer Management at Unilever Food Solutions, wanted to delve deeper into the human factor: ‘The challenge of technology is not in the technology itself, but in user adoption, in change management.’ He warned that, when poorly managed, data democratisation can cause organisations to lose sight of what should be shared and how. He also put forward a compelling idea: just as companies design a customer journey for clients, they should develop an equivalent journey for internal users, avoiding a proliferation of single sources of truth and safeguarding data credibility.
Robles, Segmentation Manager at Pernod Ricard, explained how his organisation has chosen to simplify and customise tools to ensure adoption, treating technology according to the use case, the role and the technological maturity of each profile, based on the belief that ‘technology should not dictate the business’. From a data perspective, he explained how they generate business insights to eliminate perceptions and assumptions, and how they use those insights to design focused action plans with distributors and sales networks in order to target the right promotions to each customer. ‘We launched the segmentation strategy in Spain and it was later adopted by the global team,’ he said with satisfaction.
AI: what is coming and what is already here
In the afternoon, the UVE Day agenda revolved around artificial intelligence. Jordi Camps, CTO of UVE Solutions, spoke about the potential of supporting commercial teams with AI agents. In a talk entitled ‘The next generation of commercial intelligence’, he explained how VIKTORIA works: the artificial intelligence designed by UVE Solutions to orchestrate specialised agents. Using the metaphor of a basketball team, he broke down the functionality of these agents, which include Self-Service Analytics, Business Alerts and Ask the Data, among others, and explained the specific tasks in which they can support different profiles within a company. ‘If every company has the same Claude, what makes them different? How they apply AI to their real challenges: their rules, their context and their way of operating, governed and at scale,’ Camps reflected.
In addition, with the help of Aleix Díaz, Product Owner at UVE Solutions, examples were shared of questions that attendees asked VIKTORIA and how it answered them. This demonstration led into the final talk of the day, delivered by Silvia Leal, who holds a PhD in Sociology from the Pontifical University of Salamanca and is one of the most influential voices in digital innovation. ‘We need to understand the landscape and use it to do our work better, rather than allow ourselves to be led by prejudice. We will not want to go back because, if we properly understand how it should be done, the opportunities to continue growing and to prosper are overwhelming.’
Leal, who advises the European Commission and the OECD, argued that the key to using AI successfully is the business case. ‘It is necessary to define the objective with which I am going to introduce AI, as well as to have quality data, good governance and critical thinking, because artificial intelligence, like humans, is not perfect.’
Looking ahead to UVE Solutions’ 20th anniversary
UVE Day 2026 ended with a Music & Drinks session and a reminder that the next edition will celebrate UVE Solutions’ 20th anniversary. ‘We are going to have an unforgettable celebration,’ Pep Planas anticipated in his closing remarks.
