Using AI to fuel creativity: How Agentic AI Is Unlocking Bolder Ideas

Innovation teams have never had more data at their fingertips, yet genuinely new ideas remain frustratingly hard to find. In crowded FMCG categories, novelty is increasingly rare, and incremental innovation just isn’t enough to keep brands ahead.

So how do you turn data overload into distinctive ideas?

That’s the challenge MMR Research Worldwide set out to tackle with a new kind of AI-powered ideation tool to help brands move faster, without losing their consumer grounding.

MMR has been at the forefront of developing AI personas: interactive, chat-based representations of real consumer segments, grounded in robust segmentation data rather than fictional stereotypes. These personas allow teams to explore motivations, trade-offs, and reactions dynamically, going far beyond static reports.

But while AI personas are powerful, they’re still limited by the scope of the data they’re built on. Most organizations hold far more insight than any one team can realistically connect at speed: historical learnings, trend reports, sensory data, portfolio knowledge, and more.

That sparked a new question:
What if AI could actively retrieve, combine, and iterate across all that knowledge, autonomously?

As presented at the recent MRS AI Conference 2026, Alexandra Kuzmina, Innovation Director, showcased the Ideas Accelerator Agent, a multi-stage, iterative AI system designed to push ideas further, faster.

Rather than generating concepts in a single pass, the pipeline:

• Pulls from multiple internal and external knowledge sources

• Iteratively enhances and challenges its own outputs

• Refines ideas over several cycles to increase distinctiveness and novelty

To understand whether this approach genuinely delivered something new, MMR and Heineken ran an experimental study.

Both Heineken’s existing AI flavor personas tool and the Agentic Ideation Pipeline were given identical prompts, each generating ten flavor ideas. These were then blinded and evaluated by:

• 354 UK consumers

• 6 Heineken stakeholders

The answer was a clear yes.

Ideas generated by the Ideas Accelerator Agent were consistently perceived as:

• More new and different

• More emotionally distinctive, described as adventurous, daring, and intriguing

• Less conventional than those from standard AI persona ideation

Used as part of one of our innovation sprints, Ideas Accelerator Agent can:

• Reduce blind spots created by fragmented data

• Help your brand balance incremental and exploratory innovation

• Support more deliberate portfolio design, rather than one-size-fits-all ideas

Curious to see what agentic ideation could unlock for your brand?

If you’re looking to accelerate innovation, surface bolder ideas, and make better use of the insight you already have, we’d love to show you how it works in practice.

Get in touch with the team at MMR to explore how AI personas and agentic pipelines can help you move faster, think broader, and build more distinctive products, with consumer understanding at the core.