MUMBAI: When your empire stretches across 15 lakh retail outlets and five different sales channels, you don’t use spreadsheets—you use AI. DS Group, one of India’s heavyweight FMCG conglomerates, has teamed up with enterprise AI platform O9 to turbocharge its digital transformation and planning muscle across its business verticals.

The DS Group-O9 partnership will roll out AI-powered forecasting, demand planning, and supply chain visibility enhancements across DS Group’s sprawling distribution ecosystem. That includes general trade, modern trade, ecommerce, quick commerce, and institutional channels—a web of more than 100 super stockists, 5,000+ distributors, and a direct-to-retail reach of over 15 lakh stores nationwide.

"Our partnership with O9 marks a significant step in DS Group's digital transformation journey. We aim to leverage their cutting-edge Enterprise Knowledge Graph and agile platform to drive scalability, enhance collaboration, and unlock predictive insights, crucial for navigating the dynamic Indian FMCG landscape and future growth,” said DS Group SVP, information technology Santosh K Singh.

DS Group becomes one of the first major Indian FMCG players to tap into O9’s enterprise-grade AI suite—known for its modular setup, machine-learning forecasts, and sector-savvy Consumer Products Reference Model.

O9’s predictive dashboards and planning algorithms will sit at the core of DS Group’s supply strategy, helping teams visualise performance, respond to disruptions, and unify siloed data sets in real time. PwC India is spearheading the implementation, with teams from all three organisations working like a single organism to get things live.

"Multiple teams from DS Group, PwC and O9 came together as ‘one team’ throughout the journey that helped in smooth go live. We will now help in adoption through user engagement, training and support so that DS Group fully embraces the solution,” said PwC India director Rohit Saxena.

O9’s co-founder & CEO Chakri Gottemukkala added, "We are extremely proud to partner with DS Group as they modernise their planning capabilities across core business units. The company’s focus on unifying data, teams and planning processes reflects a clear commitment to agility and long-term value creation."

The digitisation push comes at a time when India’s FMCG sector is sprinting to keep pace with shifting demand signals, inflation tremors, and rising consumer expectations. With its new AI toolkit in play, DS Group looks ready to turn planning paralysis into predictive precision.