AI Global Strategy Alignment System
Jul, 2025
Project Background
In early 2025, Kanta expanded into strategic consulting by integrating industry expertise with customized AI solutions. Our first major opportunity arose with Ausnutria Dairy, a subsidiary of Yili Group, which was preparing its first global strategy upgrade since COVID-19. Initially framed as a “post-pandemic recovery” initiative, the project soon revealed a deeper challenge: long-standing misalignment between China HQ and regional teams in the Netherlands, Germany, and Southeast Asia.
Local teams consistently felt unheard and overlooked. Their insights into consumer behavior, market dynamics, and regulatory realities rarely shaped HQ’s strategy. Documents from HQ were often seen as abstract slogans disconnected from local realities. This was not merely a communication gap, but a systemic exclusion problem—a dynamic common in many multinational organizations where HQ defines both language and strategy, while local subsidiaries are relegated to passive execution.
Our Approach
To address this challenge, we designed a project that prioritized listening and co-creation. Instead of imposing solutions, we conducted a comprehensive diagnostic to understand the perspectives of local employees.
Developed and refined a survey (20+ iterations) distributed across multiple markets.
Conducted 10 focus groups, interviewing 50+ local managers from sales, supply chain, raw materials, and private label teams.
Synthesized insights to build an AI-powered strategic agent capable of combining industry data, employee feedback, regulatory requirements, and linguistic nuances into localized, actionable playbooks for each market.
This approach ensured that HQ’s top-level directives were translated into operational guidance that local teams could understand, execute, and refine, while embedding local voices upstream in the strategy-making process.
Execution
We managed a global team of 70+ members across regions. Together, we developed a trackable, executable implementation plan covering:
Global supply chain alignment
Product portfolio strategy (with emphasis on Kabrita infant formula)
Go-to-market priorities across regions
A phased roadmap for synchronized execution
To institutionalize this new approach, we hosted a Global Strategy Summit in Zwolle, the Netherlands. Over 100 stakeholders attended, including HQ executives, the CFO, the global coordination office, HR teams, and production facility leaders from the Netherlands, New Zealand, and other regions.
This summit departed from traditional top-down meetings and became a genuine industry-informed dialogue. For the first time, HQ executives heard the Dutch market’s analysis of infant dairy trends, and aligned with the New Zealand plant on sustainability practices. The AI-powered playbooks guided discussions, turning abstract HQ strategy into concrete, locally relevant actions.
Impact
The project delivered both tangible results and a cultural breakthrough:
For the first time, local employee voices were embedded into strategy-making upstream, not as afterthoughts.
HQ shifted from directive leadership to collaborative dialogue, fostering trust with local teams.
The AI-powered playbook + localized feedback loop became a scalable model, which Ausnutria HQ decided to roll out across other subsidiaries.
This initiative redefined global strategy-making from a one-way flow of directives to a co-created process grounded in local realities. It reinforced our conviction that effective global strategy is not about enforcing uniformity, but about empowering local employees to co-create the strategic agenda itself.