Hershey Bets on AI Agents to Fix Its $2 Billion Marketing Blind Spot

What AI actually does 

Mutinex has built what it describes as a “multi-agent system,” where each agent acts as a domain specialist. For example, one agent understands marketing econometrics, another understands competitive pricing theory, another diagnoses model failures. 

By combining Tracer, which cleans and makes sense of Hershey’s data infrastructure, with Mutinex’s AI system, Hershey is now able run models in as little as three weeks.

In practice, that means faster iteration on how marketing spend is evaluated and adjusted, rather than waiting for lagging historical reads.

“Most companies don’t have an AI problem. They have a data readiness problem,” said Sarah Martinez, chief commercial officer, Tracer. 

Justifying media budget  

Early signals suggest the shift could pay off. While Mutinex’s system is still rolling out, Hershey expects to increase revenue attributable to media by 4% to 5%.

Hershey typically ran MMM analysis three times a year for about five brands with results arriving months later. With Mutinex and Tracer, the company is now moving toward measuring its entire brand portfolio on a monthly basis—up to 12 times a year.

Whether that plays out at scale remains an open question. For Hershey, though, the shift is already influencing how it plans and allocates spend.

“You take all of our trade dollars into account—anywhere from two plus billion dollars of investment going between media and trade marketing—you can now start to make decisions off of on a monthly basis,” Rinaldi said. “This is a complete game-changing moment for our organization.” 

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