Dr Kevin McCarthy, Co-Founder and CEO of Advise, wrote this commercial profile for Checkout*'s Top 100 Brands 2026, on what separates the brands that climb the list from those that slip. Read the full issue online.*
Everyone reads the annual Checkout Top 100 Brands the same way. First you find your own brand. Then you find your competitor's. Then you ask the only question that matters: why did we move?
After 20 years building enterprise data analytics solutions, I can offer an uncomfortable answer. It is almost never the data. Every brand in this issue works with broadly the same raw materials: EPOS, distribution, shopper, price and promotion data. If data alone won rankings, this list would never change. But it changes every year. At its heart, the Top 100 Brands list ranks who turns that data into the best decisions, and how fast they do it.
The job has never been harder
Talk to any category team in Ireland and you hear the same story: more channels and missions than ever, each with different needs; more retailer asks, all arriving faster; more data sources to reconcile, and the same number of hours in the week. Up to 70% of that time now goes on wrangling spreadsheets rather than the work that moves a brand up this list: advising retailers, building category visions and telling stories that buyers act on.
It plays out the same way everywhere. A buyer emails a simple question on Tuesday morning about a new pack size in convenience. Between the data pull, the reconciliation and the slide-building, the answer goes back on Friday afternoon. By then the buyer has moved on, and so has the moment. Plenty of data in that story, but not enough connected decisions.
The IGD tells category teams that the future belongs to category leadership, not better category management. But where will that leadership come from? AI and digital transformation topped the agenda at this year's ECR Ireland Leaders Forum, and in October Dublin hosts the EU Presidency's International AI Summit. Herein lies the answer.
Why the first wave of AI pitches fell flat
Every category leadership team has sat through an AI pitch by now. Most went nowhere, and the reasons come down to the two words this industry cares about most: trust and security.
Trust, because general-purpose models hallucinate plausible numbers and deliver them with absolute confidence. One invented share figure in a buyer meeting and credibility is gone, for the tool and the team that used it. Security, because the data category work runs on is licensed, commercially sensitive, or both, and cannot simply be handed to a public model.
None of this makes the technology weak. Typical GenAI is remarkable at many tasks, but what it doesn't know is FMCG: your categories, your retailers, your promo mechanics, the quirks in your own feeds. The real risk to your team isn't being replaced by AI. It is being outpaced by the AI-enabled team across town that answers the buyer's question before you can open Excel.
Decisions, at the speed of the question
This is the problem we built Advise to solve. It brings retailer, syndicated and internal data together into one view, giving you a single source of truth. Behind it sits a deterministic engine running on eight years of FMCG analytical logic, so there's no guesswork. On top, the intelligence layer lets your team converse with its data, with automatic analytics reporting and trusted briefs, in a secure environment.
None of this replaces category professionals. The machine takes on the wrangling, reporting and pattern-hunting, while people keep what wins rankings: judgement, strategy, influence and the story the buyer believes.
In this issue, almost one in three of these Top 100 Brands, including six of this year's top ten, run their category analytics on Advise, from global giants to Irish family businesses, across soft drinks, snacks, dairy, cooked meats and frozen foods. Advise is built in Ireland, with Irish data on Irish grocery categories.
Next year's list is being decided now
Next year's Top 100 Brands list won't be made next summer. It is being formed now, in hundreds of small decisions on range, price, promotion, distribution and pack size. The brands that climb will be the ones making the fastest decisions, using numbers everyone in the room can trust.
The data is no longer the differentiator. The decisions are. Category teams running on Advise start every morning with the analysis already done and the insights waiting. When next year's list is decided, will your brand be one of them?
First published as a commercial profile in Checkout Top 100 Brands 2026*. The intelligence layer it describes was then called Advise Plus.*
Read Matt Peat on what 20 years of the Top 100 says about Irish lifeBook a demo