The next wave of AI for content creation includes digital twins

AI offers retail and consumer goods brands a wealth of solutions that transform creativity and reduce time and cost of resource-intensive tasks across the content supply chain. As witnessed at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity in June 2025, AI is the new “plus one” to marketing chiefs and agency leaders. However, the potential of AI unleashed new pressure to chief marketing officers to not only scale proof of concepts (POCs), but prove their value—all while keeping the marketing engine running at a breakneck pace.

For consumer packaged goods (CPGs), delivering personalized content across channels requires multiple iterations of product images, constant reshoots, tweaks, packaging design adjustments, and localization by region. This can be all-consuming for creatives, who are rebuilding or recreating imagery constantly to meet the moment.

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Imagine if brands could leverage AI digital twins to create and integrate high-quality, personalized product content at scale—simply, cost-effectively, and in a fraction of the time. AI and 3D digital twins make it possible, proving AI investments deliver on reduced time and speed to innovation.

In a recent post, we discussed how AI isn’t just a tool—it’s the foundation for building competitive advantage. Let’s walk through three strategic areas where digital twins offer exceptional outcomes for marketing teams looking to deliver more.

1. Starting with product imagery

According to EMARKETER, content creation will be the top budget priority AI use case for chief marketing officers worldwide. Why? Producing product images today requires brands to spend a massive chunk of their budget to constantly reshoot and edit images. With digital twins, brands have the flexibility and scalability at low cost to create thousands of variants on a single product image, including labels, packaging, and language formats—all within a single file.

AI empowers not only productivity but creativity. Digital twins are hyper-realistic, enabling content managers to easily and endlessly modify or expand on a concept using a 3D product model with a few clicks. Creatives can reallocate time spent in operational “to do’s” to storytelling, strategy, and delivery by channel. Brands can even showcase products in both static and dynamic formats because AI models aren’t limited to one dimension.

Net-net: Digital twins for product images, videos, and interactive experiences simplify content workflows and allow you to:

Generate endless product images or videos using a single digital twin.
Refresh imagery for markets or seasons without reshoots.
Reduce repetitive labor for creatives while shortening production timelines.
Test creative concepts instantly without adding costs.
Update visuals across brands seamlessly.

Making it real: Nestlé reduces associated time and cost by 70% with scaling digital twins

Recently, Nestlé—the world’s largest food and beverage company—collaborated with Microsoft, Accenture Song, and NVIDIA to build and launch a new AI-powered in-house service to create high-quality product content at scale.

With its new digital twin content supply chain powered by NVIDIA Omniverse on Microsoft Azure and using Microsoft AI solutions, content creators across Nestlé’s 45 content studios around the world can deliver high-quality creative assets at scale for e-commerce and marketing communications. Nestlé’s Integrated Marketing Services (IMS)—250 marketing experts in seven hubs—are working on scaling the digital twins and driving content localization.

Nestlé already has a baseline of 4,000 3D digital products, mainly for global brands, with the ambition to convert a total of 10,000 products into digital twins in the next two years across global and local brands.

Proving the value of AI investments in digital twins:

70% reduced time and cost associated with scaling digital twins.
Faster content production for several brands, including Purina, Nescafé Dolce Gusto, and Nespresso.
Better ability to position iconic brands in a fast-moving digital environment.
Seamless updates for seasonal campaigns or channel-specific formats.

For Nestlé, these technologies are proving to be catalysts for creative ingenuity, revolutionizing creative workflows in design, supercharging content creation, and enabling nuanced personalization—positioning Nestlé at the forefront of marketing.

Learn more from this video about conversations Chief Marketing Officers had with Microsoft at the recent Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity event:

2. Digital twins enable game-changing one-to-one consumer experiences

Digital twins are generating realistic virtual experiences that not only enhance the shopper journey but also hyper-personalize each touchpoint to create memorable brand moments. AI has enabled interoperability between datasets to unlock online configurators, virtual reality product trials and visualizations, and in-store displays.

Net-net: Embedding AI in user experiences is allowing consumer and retail goods companies to enable:

Try-ons for beauty products and fashion.
Configurators for custom merchandise.
Interactive, 360-degree product views.

3. Next level: Media and creative, together at last

The era of AI ushers in a world of “intelligence on tap.”

Imagine if AI-powered digital product twins merge product imagery and consumer insights to create visuals targeted to specific audience segments or even individual customers.

A combination of insights and digital twin content creation empowers marketers to optimize for better impact and even map future trends. The value of building digital twins goes beyond endless product image creation. CPG brands are now leveraging AI to connect real-time campaign insights to their content studios as a primary use case to prove value. Agents are being built to perform audience simulations, test images, content, and even segmentation strategy to drive higher return on ad spend (ROAS) or even predict impact.

Net-net: Use AI to connect media insights and content to:

Simulate, refine, and test marketing scenarios and consumer responses.
Increase campaign effectiveness with real-time, iterative feedback.
Test and optimize personalized marketing strategies at scale.
Model customer segments and predict campaign outcomes.

AI as a tool to amplify human creativity

As AI continues to evolve traditional processes and enhance productivity, marketers know human creativity remains a critical resource. With digital simulations and AI together, you can reallocate your valuable resources to more strategic, creative tasks; reduce costs and risk; and help your marketing teams optimize spend and focus on your number one KPI: growth.