AI - Team Collaboration: Labatt Breweries

Labatt Canada realized that for sales leaders to win with retailers, they’d need to engage in a new, AI-driven approach. Our journey together included two parts: first, Labatt would need to work together as a team within a Simulated space to experience their own strengths and ineffective behaviors in action. Then, teams would need to participate in customer intelligence training, utilizing the right tools and resources to turn that learning into action.

To accomplish step one, see6 built out an AI-driven simulation experience in which Labatt teams were tasked with working together under pressure to make hard choices and uncover collective pain points. Teams then took their results back to the drawing board, using see6’s methodologies, tools, and resources to practice new retailer-facing behaviors.

It became clear that while the teams were strong in many areas, they all struggled with the side-effects of disregarding data: relying on groupthink, taking comfort in assumptions, and rushing to action without taking time to plan. In order to create awareness of these behavioral tendencies, we sought to create a simulated space in which teams would need to challenge one another, create cohesive plans, and question assumptive truths in order to succeed.

We knew that simply creating awareness of growth opportunities wouldn’t be enough to drive action within Labatt, however, and we would need to create a complimentary learning session in which participants could discuss results and discover ways to bring new behaviors to life on the job in order for our mindset shifts to stick.

In order to create team-wide recognition of strengths (competitiveness, communication) and fault lines (groupthink, rushing to action) we designed a highly engaging simulation that forced teams to work together across silos to share information, creating space for both disagreement and alignment on critical data-driven strategy.

We then designed three virtual sessions using materials from our Intelligence Lab® to connect learning and insights from the simulation with actionable real-world skills and habits that leaders could utilize in retailer relationships.

Our AI simulations are always driven by research and desired client outcomes, and this was no different. After gathering intake from Labatt stakeholders, we set to work creating a complex environment that was swimming in data- some useful, some distracting- just like the real world. We asked ourselves how we might gamify certain stressful situations and bring out complex reactions. And then, of course, we made it look (and sound) incredibly cool.

When creating our amplify retrospectives, we knew it was imperative to put the sim outputs into action. To do so, we created a life-like fictional scenario and practiced utilizing data to formulate a hypothesis, map assumptions, and formulate key questions with the fictional retailer.

In the end, Labatt sales leaders identified over 28 lessons, crafted over 56 new business-focused questions, and created over 25 new behaviors to bring AI to future retailer interactions.