The packaging industry is entering a new era.

For decades, packaging development followed a largely linear process—research, design, prototyping, testing, and commercialization. While digital tools improved speed and collaboration, packaging teams still faced increasing complexity driven by evolving consumer expectations, sustainability goals, retailer requirements, regulatory demands, and compressed development timelines.

Today, artificial intelligence is helping organizations rethink how packaging innovation happens.

At the American Packaging Summit, Kevin Brong, Vice President of Packaging Center of Excellence at Newell Brands, shared how AI is reshaping packaging development and enabling teams to work faster, make more informed decisions, and unlock new opportunities for innovation.

Moving Beyond AI Experimentation

The conversation around AI often focuses on future possibilities. At Newell Brands, the focus is on practical applications that create measurable business value.

Rather than viewing AI as a standalone technology initiative, Newell is embedding AI capabilities throughout the packaging development process. The goal is simple: enable packaging professionals to spend less time searching for information, performing repetitive tasks, and navigating complexity—and more time innovating.

This approach reflects a broader shift occurring across the consumer goods industry. As packaging challenges become more interconnected, organizations need tools that help connect consumer insights, sustainability considerations, retailer requirements, supply chain realities, and engineering expertise into a unified decision-making process.

Applying AI Across the Packaging Lifecycle

Packaging development requires hundreds of decisions, from early concept creation through final commercialization. AI can help support these decisions at multiple stages. The biggest challenge isn't the technology. It's helping packaging professionals learn new ways of working.

In the early phases of development, AI can assist with project intake, requirements gathering, feasibility assessments, and identification of similar historical solutions. During concept development, teams can explore multiple design options, evaluate costs, compare material alternatives, and accelerate concept generation.

As projects progress, AI can help streamline specification development, compliance reviews, documentation, testing support, and optimization activities. The result is a more connected workflow that improves speed, consistency, and knowledge sharing across teams.

Most importantly, AI enables packaging organizations to leverage institutional knowledge more effectively. Instead of expertise residing in individual files, systems, or teams, information becomes more accessible and actionable across the enterprise.

Accelerating Innovation Through Intelligent Automation

One of the most promising applications of AI is the ability to reduce the time required to move from an idea to a viable packaging concept.

Packaging teams can now explore multiple creative directions, generate visual concepts, evaluate packaging configurations, and assess potential tradeoffs significantly faster than traditional approaches. AI can significantly accelerate early-stage packaging exploration, enabling teams to evaluate concepts, access relevant knowledge, and assess tradeoffs in a fraction of the time required by traditional approaches.

This acceleration does not replace packaging expertise. It amplifies it.

Engineers, designers, and packaging professionals remain responsible for making decisions, validating concepts, and ensuring solutions meet performance, consumer, and business requirements. AI serves as an intelligent assistant that helps teams explore more possibilities and make better-informed choices.

Building the Future of Packaging Intelligence

As AI capabilities continue to evolve, the greatest opportunity may lie in connecting packaging knowledge, data, and workflows into a single intelligent ecosystem.

At Newell Brands, we are advancing a more connected approach to packaging development through AI-enabled agents and intelligent workflows that bring together engineering standards, testing protocols, sustainability considerations, retailer requirements, and packaging knowledge. By integrating these resources into an always-informed development environment, teams can make faster, more confident decisions while maintaining quality, compliance, and consumer focus.

The vision extends beyond productivity gains. It is about creating a smarter packaging organization—one that learns continuously, shares knowledge globally, and scales best practices across brands and categories.

Human-Led, AI-Enhanced

The future of packaging will not be defined solely by new materials, formats, or technologies. It will also be shaped by how effectively organizations leverage intelligence to solve increasingly complex challenges.

Artificial intelligence is creating new opportunities to improve speed, enhance collaboration, strengthen decision-making, and accelerate innovation. Yet the most successful implementations will continue to rely on human expertise, creativity, and judgment.

At Newell Brands, the approach is clear: human-led, AI-enhanced.

Packaging decisions rarely exist in isolation. A material change can affect sustainability performance, manufacturing efficiency, transportation costs, retailer requirements, and the consumer experience. One of AI's greatest opportunities is helping teams understand those connections more quickly and make better-informed decisions across the entire packaging system.

By combining packaging expertise with emerging AI capabilities, the company is helping shape the future of packaging development—creating solutions that are smarter, faster, and better equipped to meet the needs of consumers, retailers, and a rapidly changing marketplace.