As artificial intelligence transforms how companies operate, food and beverage giants like Hershey, Mars, Kraft Heinz and Unilever are increasingly relying on Aera Technology – a pioneer in autonomous decision-making – to guide some of their biggest strategic moves.
The Mountainview, Calif.-based tech company, which launched in 2017 and has raised $263 million, specializes in AI-powered corporate decision-making with a focus on supply chain management.
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The agentic AI technology integrates with corporations’ tech stacks to prevent data silos and other organizational problems that can lead to misguided conclusions and costly inefficiencies, attribution.
“We define ourselves as the decision intelligence agents, so we’re here to facilitate companies optimizing the way they make decisions, and we try not to deviate from that,” said Aera Chief Revenue Officer Gonzalo Benedit. “We do it by understanding the business, coming up with concrete recommendations, taking actions on those recommendations and learning from those decisions.”
What is Aera Technology?
In just under a decade, Aera has built an AI-powered decision-making platform with predictive models that can coordinate a wide variety of functions within a corporate structure.
“We’re helping them to make better decisions when it comes to inventory management, waste reduction, logistics, customer service and planner productivity,” Benedit explained.
As the company has grown and fine-tuned its models to cater to different scenarios, so has its ability to apply different decision-making approaches.
Aera most recently developed agentic capabilities within its framework, enabling AI agents to develop strategies and analyses independent of corporate decision-makers.
Humans, however, still make the final call, Benedit said.
“Agentic AI has been an incredible boost to what we do, because now our platform acts as a platform of agents, or agent orchestration,” he said. The tech performs like a vast team of analysts working in unison to break down layers of corporate bureaucracy in order to correct decision-making blindspots, he explained.
Hershey’s AI decision-making gambit
Hershey is embracing AI decision-making technology and increasingly relying on Aera to help guide it through a chaotic confectionery industry.
At the 2025 North American Supply Chain Executive Summit (NASCES) in September, Fred Laluyaux, co-founder, president and CEO of Aera Technology discussed the application of the technology with Douglas Guilherme, global supply chain vice president at The Hershey Company.
Confectioners face massive volatility and a broad range of headwinds in the supply chain, and AI-powered decision-making is keeping their biggest priorities front and center, Guilherme said.
Traditionally at Hershey, supply chain managers constantly assess what worked and what didn’t in getting the product to its final destination. Aera’s so-called decision intelligence takes a forward-looking approach, he said.
When a supply chain problem arises, the company establishes a root cause and implements systemic actions to prevent it from happening again, Guilherme explained. Aera’s predictive modeling empowers Hershey to identify and avoid the problem before it takes place, he said.
“We need to have decision intelligence to help us to look around the corners,” he said.
Hershey's AI playbook
Hershey initially focused its AI efforts with Aera on three topics, Douglas Guilherme, global supply chain vice president at The Hershey Company, said at the 2025 North American Supply Chain Executive Summit (NASCES).
- Supply chain loss prevention - “Proactively and rapidly addresses excess production/inventory risks based on shelf-life considerations, within critical frozen horizons while managing the operational constraints.”
- Material risk management – “Mitigates material risk by integrating core systems to recommend buying adjustments, reducing excess inventory and cash constraints while preventing shortages and interruptions.”
- Finished goods norm sensing – “Adjusts rates and firm period settings based on real-time production insights to align system parameters with factory conditions, improving conformance and planning reliability.”
Aera’s growth trajectory
Aera recently earned accolades from within the AI industry when it received the Magic Quadrant for Decision Intelligence Platforms award in January from global research and advisory firm Gartner.
“Aera Decision Cloud delivers audited decision automation, enabling systems to act while humans review later. In 2026, Aera plans innovations including autonomous agent teams that self-assemble for decisions, learning and governance agents to optimize policies and enforce compliance, and multidimensional simulation integrated with agentic AI,” according to Gartner.
Gartner praised Aera’s strengths in pricing, sales execution and strong market vision, but cautioned that the company’s concentration in oil and gas, natural resources and manufacturing reveals a “narrower growth profile.”
“With heavy platform investments, Aera Technology’s lack of profitability to date and average revenue growth may raise concerns about long-term financial stability,” Gartner warned.
Big business catches up on AI
A lot has changed in the AI sector since Aera launched, particularly in the public awareness and acceptance of the technology, according to Benedit. Explaining AI-powered decision-making to corporate executives nine years ago was a tough sell, he said.
“Companies would say, ‘I love the vision, I love the demo, but this is kind of science fiction to me,’” he said. “Now the conversation is, ‘OK, we’d like to get going, so how do we go about it? When do we start? What is it?’”
Benedit said that momentum is helping the company scale beyond its current footprint of North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific-Japan.
“The technology is ready and the market is ready, so we’re seeing an acceleration,” he said.
Aera will likely hold another funding round in 2026, and might decide to go public down the road, Benedit said, adding that “we are not conditioned by that.”
“We are a healthy business,” he said, adding that market acceleration would be the motivation for future fundraising.
