Shane McGibney has worn many hats during his 20-plus year career at Kerry Group, the Irish company utilizing biotechnology and food sciences to supply more than 18,000 specialised ingredients to food, beverage and pharmaceutical makers all around the world.
He added another when he was named both Business President with responsibility for Transformation, and CEO of Kerry’s Biotechnology Solutions business, overseeing forward-thinking food solutions like enzymes and probiotics, while simultaneously leading the way as Kerry looks to sharpen its competitive edge across businesses and functions.
“There’s quite a variety in the content of my role and quite a variety in terms of my responsibilities,” McGibney says. “One day I could be talking about a global business services process review for supply chain. The next day I could be talking about a new fermentation process for a product.”
Copilot as a knowledge partner
McGibney’s biggest obstacle is trying to synthesize all the information he needs to do his job effectively and address some of the gaps he may have in his background, which is primarily business-oriented, not scientific. That’s where Microsoft 365 Copilot comes in.
“My biggest challenge is in compiling information that I do not have familiarity with,” he says. “I don’t have an expertise in science. So, I need to find a way to quickly get up to speed in certain details on market dynamic, or in some of the latest processing techniques because I’m speaking with scientists or I’m making investment decisions. So, where I’m really thrilled about Copilot and where I’m really leveraging it is as a knowledge partner, and it’s been phenomenal.”
McGibney cited a recent example where he was given an 86-page acquisition proposal to review right before the holidays. He leveraged Copilot and Researcher to summarize the document, cutting down his reading time, and to ask probing questions that revealed gaps, risks and opportunities within the proposal.
“It gave me a much better perspective on that potential acquisition and I was much more informed in 90 minutes,” he says. “I did not read the document. I did not flip the pages. I leveraged Copilot to give me executive summaries of all the different sections and I chose to ask questions as I would of any potential acquisition based on my experience and interrogate that data. Copilot did exceptionally well for me.”
From productivity to competitive edge
McGibney was one of the early adopters as Kerry launched the Copilot program. Surveys of that cohort revealed that most users saved at least 20 minutes per use case and that 97% of the users wanted to continue using Copilot for their daily tasks. McGibney says he no longer works offline, as Copilot’s tools help him work more strategically.
Aside from the productivity benefits, McGibney is excited about Copilot’s potential to unlock institutional knowledge bases and combine that with external data to get one step ahead.
“We often say, ‘If Kerry only knew what Kerry knew,’” McGibney says, reflecting a desire to efficiently tap the organization’s full bank of knowledge. “With 50-plus years as a business, we’ve solved customer problems time and time again. We’ve probably solved similar issues for customers in China, the US and Europe. But we haven’t leveraged all this knowledge because previously it’s been held in people’s files or within different systems.
“Copilot allows us to combine our information with the latest external thinking on a specific topic. It’s the combination of Kerry’s proprietary insight with the latest market trends and data, which gives us real competitive advantage, and that’s exciting.”
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Elliott Smith writes about AI and innovation at Microsoft, from how the Premier League is transforming its online presence to why AI may play a major role in saving the Amazon rainforest. Previously, Smith worked as a sports reporter in Washington, D.C., Washington state and Texas, covering high schools to the pros. You can contact him on LinkedIn.
