$2 billion. That's how much Hershey spends annually on marketing - and Adweek reports that the company has been operating with a significant blind spot about where that money actually goes. Hershey is now deploying AI agents - software programs that can take actions autonomously, chain together tasks, and operate without constant human instruction - to map and optimize that spend.
The core problem Hershey is trying to solve is one that plagues every major advertiser: attribution. At $2B in annual spend spread across TV, digital, retail, social, and in-store channels, connecting individual campaigns to actual sales outcomes is genuinely hard. Traditional analytics tools track clicks and impressions but struggle to connect the dots across channels, retailers, and time periods.
Agentic AI changes the equation somewhat. Instead of human analysts manually pulling reports from a dozen data sources and building spreadsheets, agents can continuously ingest data, identify patterns, and surface recommendations with more speed and less human bottleneck. What once took a team weeks can happen closer to real time.
What's notable here isn't the ambition - every major brand is making similar moves. What stands out is the candor about the actual problem. Most companies running AI marketing pilots talk about "optimization" without admitting they didn't know where their money was going in the first place. Hershey framing this as fixing a genuine blind spot is more honest than the typical press release language.
The practical question is whether the agents deliver actionable insight or produce dashboards that executives look at but don't act on. At $2B in spend, even a 1% efficiency improvement would justify the investment. Hershey hasn't shared specific results from the initiative yet.