By Zeus Kerravala
Publication Date: 2026-11-10 22:20:00
What customers said
The customer stories made the case more effectively than the product slides. John Kelvie, chief digital and information officer at Asahi Beverages, described a greenfield Melbourne head office for about 1,000 employees, built on Cisco’s SD-Access architecture so the network could be segmented and secured from the start. “We couldn’t build tomorrow’s AI organization and enterprise on yesterday’s technology,” he said, calling the network “the nervous system” of the company. Asahi has since brought OT on the production floor onto a single IP network. The goal was a consistent experience, whether an employee is at the head office, a brewery, a distribution center, or in Malaysia or New Zealand. As Kelvie put it, the technology “just had to work.”
Asahi already uses AI for demand sensing, forecast optimization, trade promotion, and back-office automation. Kelvie said the next phase is to shift from team-level experiments to “fewer,…
