• Silvio Pfeufer uses Saltz to save time on food procurement at his Michelin-starred restaurant, Matthias.
• Saltz uses agentic AI to modernize a typically complicated process between food buyers and sellers.
• For independent eateries, the streamlined process can reduce costs and increase access to high-quality ingredients.

When Silvio Pfeufer first got into cheffing, he was surprised by the amount of administrative work involved.

"It's not only the evening, sending nice plates to guests. There's a lot of stuff to do to make that happen," Pfeufer told Business Insider. He took long phone calls from food suppliers and producers that kept him away from the kitchen.

Sourcing and buying food is a process riddled with disorganization, since farmers, wholesalers, logistics providers, and restaurants communicate in different ways — by phone, email, text message, and PDF blast — starting as early as 4 a.m. The cost and availability of products are constantly in flux, so sellers issue frequent updates: The price of wild-caught fish could change three times a day, for example.

When Pfeufer opened his own restaurant in 2024, he wanted to streamline his food procurement process. At Matthias, which pays homage to his late grandfather, Pfeufer uses an AI-assisted platform for food business owners called Saltz to speed up food procurement and reduce phone calls.

The time savings are critical, said Pfeufer, a co-owner and head chef at the Berlin-based eatery. Using AI agents, Saltz connects restaurants directly to suppliers via a marketplace that brings together disparate catalogs, transactions, and logistics so restaurants can compare and buy fresh, high-quality, and specialty products more quickly than with traditional food procurement processes.

The platform's standardized, real-time food data can be a game-changer for independently owned and operated restaurants like Pfeufer's, given their limited purchasing power. Saltz said that thousands of buyers and hundreds of suppliers use its technology, though it didn't share exact numbers. It said around 80% to 90% of its buyers are independent restaurants.

Connecting with high-quality and specialty suppliers

Pfeufer said he chose Saltz because he liked how the platform modernized old processes. In the two years he's used it, it's allowed him to discover new suppliers, order outside business hours, and gain better oversight on pricing, he said.

Founded in 2022, the startup uses AI agents to ingest PDFs, emails, and text messages that food sellers send to Saltz, standardize and enrich all the data, and consolidate it into a single platform. Its AI agents automatically update each seller's listings on the platform, eliminating the need for manual updates.

Buyers, meanwhile, see once-disparate product options, information, and up-to-date prices in one place. They can also order food at a time that's convenient for them and track their deliveries. "On a Sunday, at night, or in the morning, I can do it by myself, and don't have to have all these calls," Pfeufer said.

At Matthias, which was awarded its first Michelin star in 2025 after 10 months of service, meals must meet a high standard every day, and products have to be of the freshest quality. Pfeufer orders vegetables, milk, and other items from Saltz every week, plus fresh fish twice a week. Before using Saltz, the quality of his products wasn't necessarily worse, he said, but access to new or specialist suppliers was more limited and supply chains were longer.

"The fish is now often sourced directly from the trader or farmer, without the need for intermediate storage. This allows us to avoid additional storage times that could negatively affect freshness," Pfeufer said, adding that more oversight into the supply chain — and it being shorter — means his food is more consistently high quality.

"We've definitely been able to connect with better suppliers," he told Business Insider. The chef added that he still works directly with certain local farmers, as he is often on the hunt for rare items that aren't on the platform.

For Pfeufer, using Saltz also allows him to see more costs upfront, so he can better plan how much to charge for new dishes. "It makes all the calculations much easier, which is very important for us," he said.

Agentic AI acts as a foundational tool

Saltz was founded by brothers Andrius and Thomas Šlimas, who previously built the Shopify-acquired dropshipping platform Oberlo. After spending four years inside Shopify's supply chain machine, the brothers teamed up with industry veteran Reinis Štrodahs. Their goal: modernize the $9.8 trillion food procurement industry.

"It's impossible to make sense or structure that chaos of information which lives in different places and has no common structure," Andrius said.

The Šlimas brothers said that previous unsuccessful attempts to modernize food procurement took two approaches: either trying to force suppliers and buyers onto a single platform, which required them to change how they work, or taking on the time-consuming task of manually inputting every PDF, email, and text message.

With Saltz, AI agents upload and update product listings for sellers, so individual stakeholder workflows don't have to change. Making agentic AI foundational to the process, Tomas said, gives their platform an edge.

"That gives us a speed advantage, and in this market, speed compounds into market share."

• Pinterest's VP of product management said mixing open-source and closed-source AI models helped cut costs.
• The social platform's recent AI-enabled features combine OpenAI, Alibaba, and its own AI models.
• To support this approach, Pinterest invested in cloud infrastructure and an updated hiring strategy.

In its pursuit of creating AI-supported tools for its users and advertisers, Pinterest leaders said it is actually shrinking part of its AI budget.

As companies continue to spend on AI, they face pressure from investors to show returns on investment from this fast-evolving technology. One way to do that: Stretch investments by shrinking the budget needed for the systems that power AI features.

Pinterest, the visual-first social media platform where users can save images to curate their ideas, is taking what it calls a "model-agnostic" approach to generative AI, said Vicky Gkiza, the company's vice president of product management. The strategy started in 2023 and involves combining Pinterest's proprietary AI models, developed by the company's software engineers, its closed-source models from Anthropic and OpenAI, and open-source models from Alibaba, said Gkiza.

While closed-source AI models can quickly process large amounts of data, require little maintenance, and integrate instantly into a company's existing systems due to their pre-built nature, they're typically more expensive. Open-source models, meanwhile, are typically free to download, use publicly available data, and can be modified more deeply than closed-source offerings. However, they also require the expertise of software engineers who can build, maintain, and debug these highly customizable models.

Lan Guan, the chief AI and data officer at Accenture, said companies are increasingly seeing value in a multimodal AI approach that balances performance and the cost of tokens, or the units of text AI models process. "This token cost is going to slow you down if you don't start managing them proactively," Guan told Business Insider. "Open-source will be a really good option."

Gkiza walked Business Insider through how Pinterest bolstered its blended approach to generative AI through beta testing, an updated hiring strategy focused on software development expertise, and infrastructure investments.

The tech

Pinterest uses OpenAI's closed-source large language models to support some of its product features and relies on Anthropic's Claude, another closed-source AI, for internal use cases like coding, a company spokesperson told Business Insider. Alibaba's Qwen, an open-source LLM, is used for visual and content understanding, data labeling, and assistant tasks.

With this approach, the company rolled out several new AI features in 2025, each blending open-source and closed-source generative AI, said Gkiza.

Auto-collages, a feature where advertisers can convert their product catalogs into pins that populate on shopping feeds for categories like skincare, home decor, and fashion. Pinterest began testing auto-collages at the beginning of 2024, when software engineers fine-tuned a mix of internally developed, open-source, and third-party AI models. By June 2025, auto-collages was ready for a pilot, which included a small group of retailer-advertisers like Macy's.

Then, Pinterest's voice-enabled AI feature, which uses both open-source and third-party AI to generate responses to users' queries, underwent beta testing in October 2025. Early results showed that users tended to pose more shopping-specific questions when they could ask aloud rather than typing their searches, said a Pinterest spokesperson.

"Search has been evolving so fast. It was imperative for us to use AI to improve," Gkiza told Business Insider.

The talent

To advance its new AI-enabled features and execute its blended-model approach, Pinterest also hired employees with AI and machine learning expertise to steward the customization of its large language models, said Gkiza. Former Google engineer Matthias Zenger joined the company as its vice president of engineering in April 2025. Three months later, in August, Pinterest announced it had hired software engineer Mirjam Wattenhofer to focus on e-commerce and user experiences, and that it would open an Engineering Excellence Hub in Zurich.

Both Zenger and Wattenhofer work at the Zurich office, where a team focuses on improving user experiences with AI and machine-learning technologies. In February, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready said the company would hire additional research and development workers to support the company's AI efforts.

"We are investing more in hiring the right talent — evolving the team, whether it is engineering or product management — to be much more familiar with AI," Gkiza said.

The outcome

Gkiza said the company's blended approach to AI-driven experiences costs an estimated 90% less than when Pinterest relied solely on its proprietary models, a milestone the company touted during its February 2026 fourth-quarter earnings presentation.

With its growing use of open-source AI models, the company plans to invest more in cloud-computing infrastructure, like graphics processing units, which are needed to power the cost-saving technology, Gkiza said.

Pinterest said it will continue to experiment with various AI models, prioritizing its own models for personalization, open-source models for cost-effectiveness and multimodal machine learning, and closed-source models when they still offer the best performance.

• Coca-Cola and Svedka are using AI to enhance holiday and Super Bowl ads, speeding up content creation.
• Companies like Mondelēz and Blue Chip use AI to test concepts, saving time and improving strategies.
• The tech can help CPG firms work faster, but risks include AI slop in campaigns.

Coca-Cola's holiday ad and Svedka's Super Bowl commercial share more in common than promoting a beverage — both were generated with the help of AI.

The technology is catching on at consumer goods companies, with marketing leaders adding AI to their processes on both the creative and strategic sides.

As a result, assets and campaigns are coming to fruition faster than they could without AI.

Before AI, it could take Mondelēz International up to 10 weeks — from concept to production — to spin up a six- to eight-second social media video for its Chips Ahoy! character "Chip," said Jennifer Mennes, VP and global head of digital marketing and strategy at Mondelēz International.

Now, the marketing team can prompt AI and create a video in less than five minutes. After various checks by human members of the team, the total process might take days.

The biggest opportunities aren't necessarily in "big flashy campaigns," like Super Bowl spots, Mennes said. Instead, AI is helping CPGs quickly produce a greater volume of text, headlines, social content, and lifestyle imagery. As firms pump out more content, they could risk putting out AI slop and turning off consumers with AI-generated material. But so far, the efficiency gains are proving worthwhile as companies and agencies save weeks of time, especially on high-volume work and strategy.

"It doesn't seem that exciting," Mennes said. "But it's actually driving impact."

Testing and learning with AI

AI can play a role in parts of the marketing process that are invisible to consumers, such as idea generation. Johnny Rohrbach, founder of global partnerships and operations at Silverside AI, said marketing teams and their partners can "come up with different directions until the cows come home." His AI lab works with several CPGs, including Coca-Cola, on its holiday campaigns.

Focus group testing is another AI use case. Sonja Evans, VP of business intelligence and strategy at Blue Chip Marketing Worldwide, said her agency partners with Waldo.fyi, an AI company, to create digital twins of a brand's target consumers, using detailed demographics and purchase history. The team then presents creative ideas to this synthetic audience.

"We can talk to them just like we would be talking to a consumer," Evans said. Based on the feedback, the agency whittles down the ideas before presenting them to real consumers. The feedback from digital and virtual consumers "is shockingly similar," she said.

Blue Chip — which has worked on campaigns for Bob's Red Mill, Emerald Nuts, and Panera Bread — also uses AI to create what's known as a boardomatic. This is essentially an animated version of a spot with voiceover, script, and motion, but without the time, costs, or hired talent needed for a shoot.

The agency can test multiple animated spots with consumers to gauge their reactions "before we even spend a dollar on production," Evans said. The agency then uses the feedback to decide which version goes into full production.

Avoiding the trap of AI slop

Today, consumers demand more content, creating a cycle in which brands must appear in their feeds more often to stay top of mind, Rohrbach said. Marketing budgets don't always expand to keep pace with consumer trends. He added that AI can help bridge the gap, allowing marketing teams to do more with the money they're allocated.

There's a fine line when it comes to volume, though.

"If the spots feel like garbage and if you're just pumping out content because you can, then you're going to turn off the consumer," Mennes said, adding that a human is always in the loop at Mondelēz. The CPG company sees AI as additive and enhancing how it already connects with consumers, not replacing workflows.

"Nothing goes into the market without rigorous approval," Mennes said.

For food brands, especially, imagery needs to look real and authentic, Evans said. "People are very quick to call out when something looks AI."

Consumers have blasted brands for AI slop, with many criticizing AI-generated Super Bowl ads as uninspired or low-quality. Rohrbach, whose AI lab partnered with Svedka parent company Sazerac to produce its AI Super Bowl spot, said brands need to ensure they're not putting out content that's irrelevant, poorly executed, or "a little bit tone deaf." His lab's Coca-Cola holiday ad was among the spots that drew criticism, but he said the ad performed "exceptionally well" according to internal and external testing.

The strong performance may have been partly driven by the attention it received for using AI, even though social media sentiment was largely negative. In fact, the spot was the most talked-about Christmas ad of 2025.

"I'm super proud of that ad," Rohrbach said. He added that Coca-Cola is "very much on the vanguard" of AI experimentation, and CPGs as a whole are embracing the technology due to the high demand for content.

In fact, a BCG study from February found that seven in 10 CPG marketing leaders expect GenAI to help them work faster — although only 13% said the tech is fully integrated into marketing workflows. The report said the figures point to a maturity gap. Evans said bigger brands may have larger budgets to experiment with AI, while midmarket companies are contending with tariff and inflation pressures, making them more focused on business goals than on AI experimentation.

Mennes said major CPGs are "well on their journey" and "rapidly embracing this space." Plus, she's noticed a change among her CPG peers. For the first time in her career, they're cross-sharing ideas, comparing challenges related to hallucinations, and gut-checking solutions with one another.

"It's actually refreshing," Mennes said. "If we can help each other out on that, it just accelerates our ability to transform our organizations."