Promotions, production and distributor stock are planned in separate monthly cycles that rarely agree. Sales, supply and brand teams work from one daily picture of what is selling, what is stuck, and which promotions are not paying back.
A worked example for a typical Malaysian National Brand Owner, not a description of any real company. Go through the six stages in order: paste each prompt into Claude, check the answer against how your business really works, then continue. Change the profile at the start to match yours.
Stage 1 of 6
Map how the operation really runs
Act as an operations consultant. I run a National Brand Owner in Malaysia. Profile: A Malaysian FMCG brand owner — ~12 brands, two plants, ~40,000 retail outlets via distributors, modern trade and general trade.
Interview me, one question at a time, to map how decisions actually get made today. Cover: the recurring meetings and reports, who decides what, which numbers people trust, and where decisions are late or made on gut feel.
Known friction: Selling more vs. Earning more; Deep deals vs. Brand price; Full shelves vs. Idle stock; Corner shops vs. Supermarkets; New launches vs. Range clutter.
After 8 to 10 questions, summarise the five decisions that cost us the most when made late, in a table: decision, current owner, current delay, cost of delay.
Stage 2 of 6
Design the specialist agents
Using the decision map above, design 5 specialist AI agents for our National Brand Owner: Promotion, Production, Field Sales, Factory Floor, Brand Mix.
For each agent give: the one question it answers every day, the data it reads, what it may recommend, what it must never do alone, and the format of its output.
Starting points for what each should watch:
- Promotion: uplift and cannibalisation by promo, sell-out vs. sell-in, distributor stock
- Production: production plan vs. demand, raw-material cover, finished-goods ageing
- Field Sales: route coverage, call productivity, merchandiser attendance
- Factory Floor: line efficiency, changeover losses, quality holds
- Brand Mix: brand margin, shelf share, SKU tail
Keep every agent narrow. If an agent covers two jobs, split it.
Stage 3 of 6
Wire up data and compliance
For the agents above, list the data feeds needed. Likely systems: ERP and S&OP system; Distributor management system; Retail audit and sell-out data; Plant MES.
Output a table per agent: field, source, how often it refreshes, data-quality risk, and what the agent should do if the feed is stale or missing. Mark every personal-data field and say how to minimise it.
Rules we operate under: Halal and food-safety rules, labelling regulations, Competition Act on pricing conduct, and PDPA 2010.
End with a short list of actions that always need human sign-off.
Stage 4 of 6
Design the morning brief
Design the single daily brief that pulls the 5 agents together for the CEO, ready before the first meeting of the day.
Specify how the brief merges overlapping or conflicting recommendations, how it ranks items (impact, urgency, reversibility, confidence), and the exact fields per item: what to decide, recommended action, evidence, owner, deadline, and the cost of doing nothing.
Then write a realistic sample brief of five items. Items might resemble: Cut the week-8 promo depth on Brand C: uplift does not cover the margin given away / Run an extra shift on Line 2 — distributor stock is at 4 days / Delist the bottom 15 SKUs in general trade.
Stage 5 of 6
Build and automate it
Turn the design into a working automation for our National Brand Owner.
Needs: a scheduled daily run; the 5 agents run in parallel and each saves structured JSON; a final step reads them all and sends the brief by email or chat; every run is logged with inputs, outputs and cost.
Propose the build with Claude plus a workflow tool (for example n8n or the Claude Agent SDK). Give the steps in order, what happens when a data feed fails, and a human-approval step before anything that spends money or makes a customer commitment.
Stage 6 of 6
Roll out and measure
Write a rollout plan for the National Brand Owner agent team that starts small and earns trust.
Stage 1: one agent, advisory only, run alongside the current process. Stage 2: add the other agents. Stage 3: switch on the daily brief. Stage 4: let agents prepare low-risk actions for approval.
For each stage give duration, owners, what "ready to move on" means, and the metrics to track: time to decision, how often recommendations are accepted, hours saved, and errors caught. Close with the three biggest risks and how we contain them.
