Dora Cortinas & Stibo System's Neda Nia - Master Data Management

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast, set at the intersection of commerce and tech. Your hosts, Peter VS. Bond and Sri Rajagopalan, explore how brands and retailers engage consumers in an increasingly digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG Guys.

Sri Rajagopalan (1:19)

Hello Austin, and welcome live to the main stage of Stibo Systems Connect 2026 I'm of course your host, Sri.

Also known in the industry as Papa Raj, co-founder of ThinkBlue Consulting, co-founder of the CPG Guys and father to pop stars, Lara Raj, from the bank CatSci, who just performed on It's out in a live this past weekend. And now a Mac girl, Toyota, and Kiss Nails girl, Rhea Raj, a solo artist herself, signed to Republic Records as of last Monday. That just happened.

Now, if you're wondering where my industry co-host, my... Best friend for life, Mr. Peter VS. Bond is today. Peter couldn't be here.

Because he's actually down in San Francisco. What is he doing? He's actually live at Amazon Unbox, doing a bunch of podcasts there for Amazon, with Amazon leadership the ship. right there. So, I'm going to need your help to crank up the volume here to 11 We don't want to be at 10, we don't want to be at 7 So let's hear it for these two ladies on stage who have been brave enough to be with me.

Well, all right. Before we crank it up today, make sure you hit that Subscribe button on the CPG Guys on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you listen. And of course, smash that 5-star rating because 5 Guys is the best French fries. And of course, 5 is everybody's favorite number. Follow us on LinkedIn so you never miss our daily industry insights. As I said, we're 650 episodes old. We talk to CPG retail service providers like Stibo, the C-suite, Up and Down the Chain, Off Corporate America, Cross Functional. And what are we going to do today? Today, like I mentioned, we're going to take a deep dive into the absolute backbone of modern CPG and e-commerce, master data management. So multi-domain connectivity and the bridge between enterprise transformation and probably one of the most important terminologies in industry and corporate today, agent-like AI. We're not talking about data as an isolated IT back office project. We're talking about data as a high-velocity business engine.

To bring the story of life, we invited these two lovely ladies to join me and two phenomenal leaders in our industry. First, she's driving global growth, market expansion, platform innovation for Stibo Systems. Please welcome Neda Nia, Chief Growth Officer at Stibo Systems. Joining her is a visionary leader from one of North America's most dynamic CPG beverage giants, Overseas the Enterprise Data Analytics, Decision Intelligence Strategy at QRIC Dr. Pepper. So please join me in also welcoming Dora Cortinas, Vice President of Enterprise Data Analytics at QRIC Dr. Pepper. Neda and Dora, welcome to the CPG Guys. How are you doing? Day three of the conference.

Dora Cortinas (4:10)

Awesome.

Neda Nia (4:11)

Thank you for having us.

Dora Cortinas (4:12)

Yes, thrilled.

Sri Rajagopalan (4:13)

Awesome. Thank you for joining me as well on the CPG Guys. So I'm going to jump right in and let's get started with the discussion. Dora, I'm going to go to you first.

So your role at QRIC Dr. Pepper, allows you this unique visibility to keep your finger on the pulse of your own business challenges at KDP, while also evaluating the broader market today, because you got to look at share, that's how you grow. What do you feel is the number one data friction point or legacy bottleneck that most CPG C suites are looking to solve right now?

Dora Cortinas (4:44)

So Sri, the reality is that a lot of companies have jumped right into building AI use cases, models, AI agents, without really looking at the underlying data that's making, allowing those agents to run. I'm sure a lot of the folks in this audience own Ferraris, Maseratis, right? Really sleek, cool cars. Great ride, right? If you put that car on an unpaved road with potholes, that experience, driving experience is completely different. It's the same thing with these agents and these AI use cases. Product, customer, supplier data has been focused on project by project silos across the organization, and historically haven't been asked to agree with each other. Today, you ask a cross-domain question like, what customer should be getting these products, and when, the AI has to guess.