Suntory Oceania builds its AI stack on Databricks, Copilot and SAP

Suntory Oceania is pushing deeper into AI, with Databricks, Microsoft Copilot Pro and SAP all in the mix as the drinks company tries to turn a massive digital rebuild into practical automation.

According to an iTnews report published on 22 October 2026, Suntory Oceania digital and IT director Matt Dixon told the SAP NOW AI Tour in Sydney that the company had been preparing for AI for about two years.

That AI work ran alongside a broader transformation tied to the company’s move to insource alcohol manufacturing and bring its alcohol and non-alcohol beverage operations together. iTnews reported that the program had a fixed go-live date of 1 July 2025.

The key move is data plumbing. Dixon told the event, as reported by iTnews, that Suntory Oceania had moved about 90 per cent of its datasets, around 40 in total, into Databricks over the past two years. The goal is to create a centralised data foundation that can support new AI tools and customer experience use cases.

The company is also rolling out AI for personal productivity. iTnews reported Dixon said Suntory Oceania had been seeding and scaling Copilot Pro, buying “a couple hundred” licences this year and “a few more hundred” next year, while also keeping standard Copilot access available to the wider business.

Agentic AI is on the radar too, but Suntory appears to be taking a cautious route. Dixon told the Sydney event, according to iTnews, that the company wanted to first examine native options in its core SAP environment before moving on vendor pitches.

The most concrete future use case is demand sensing. Dixon described a scenario where signals such as a heat wave and customer sell-through data could feed demand planning, inventory optimisation and stock transfer orders. Today, he said, that process is manual. In the future, an agent could prepare a stock transfer order for a human to review and approve.

SAP’s own News Centre post, published 13 August 2026, provides primary context for the event. SAP said the SAP NOW AI Tour in Sydney featured more than 20 customer presentations, including Suntory Oceania, and pushed the idea that AI success depends on simplified operations and trusted data foundations, not just big budgets.

That lines up with Suntory’s recent IT overhaul. A separate iTnews partner content article published 17 November 2025 said Suntory Oceania had completed a three-year, $30 million IT transformation supporting a $400 million carbon-neutral manufacturing and distribution facility in Queensland. It said the program rebuilt the company’s digital landscape around SAP S/4HANA across production, warehousing, sales and customer engagement.

Suntory Oceania’s own LinkedIn post, supplied as company material, said the business worked with SAP and DXC Technology to build a digital foundation connecting operations, people and customers.

The common thread is clear: before the flashy agents come the less glamorous basics. Suntory is betting that cleaner data, SAP integration and carefully scaled copilots will give it a safer path into AI-driven operations.