Greif’s market context: Economic pressure and an AI clock
Two forces are shaping Greif’s digital priorities.
The first is macroeconomic reality. An industrial downturn has softened demand, shifting the focus from growth-at-all-costs to margin protection and operational discipline. In response, Greif is doubling down on efficiency.
“A lot of focus is on automation, on removing extra steps internally in our processes, being more responsive to our customers, really bringing the underlying data together in a way that we can service our customers faster,” Jatinder says.
The second force is technological, and it’s time-sensitive. AI, and GenAI in particular, has injected urgency into digital decision-making, with new tools and capabilities emerging almost daily.
At the leadership level, the concern is less about experimentation and more about timing. “There’s a sense that there's a window of opportunity,” he says. “If another competitor jumps in and takes a lead, then we will always be behind them.”
Budgets make the trade-offs explicit. Overall digital investment is flat to declining, but AI funding is expanding, paid for by tough reprioritization elsewhere.
That’s forcing a number of questions. “We have a huge application ecosystem today with a lot of fixed fees,” Jatinder says. “How can we consolidate some of that? How can we get rid of some of that? That will still bring our total budget down, but then take some of the cost and bring it towards AI.”
The experience gap: Start with employees, not customers
Jatinder is candid about Greif’s current state of connected experience.
On a scale where a fully connected, Amazon-like experience sits at 10, he places Greif closer to three or four, a reflection of decades of acquisitions, entrenched processes and an operating model never designed for digital flow.
But rather than starting with the customer-facing layer, his focus shifts somewhere less obvious. “What is even more important in my opinion is a connected employee experience,” he says.
“If I cannot give my own colleagues a connected experience, I will never be able to translate a better connected experience for my customers.”
The reasoning is straightforward. If employees across marketing, sales and supply chain can’t easily access accurate, up-to-date customer and order information, delivering a seamless customer experience becomes impossible.
In Jatinder’s view, experience quality erodes as it travels outward, which is why fixing the internal experience isn’t optional but foundational.
Where growth and value really sit
For Jatinder, two areas stand out as the most tangible sources of value.
The first is customer order management, a high-frequency, high-friction journey that runs from order placement through fulfillment. It’s visible to customers, operationally intensive and tightly constrained by data. Get the data foundation right, Jatinder argues, and much of the rest becomes solvable.
The second opportunity is less frequent but more symbolic: customer onboarding. Today, onboarding cuts across ERP, supply chain, finance and credit, with no single owner and little visibility for customers into where they stand. For a company with more than a century of operating history, that first interaction sets the tone for the relationship.
“If we can't come across as very seasoned, that’s not a great first impression.”
What’s working
Greif’s B2B commerce platform, Greif+, stands out as one of the company’s clearest digital wins. Customers who use it are more engaged and consistently report higher satisfaction, reinforcing its role in improving experience.
But Jatinder is careful not to oversell the financial story. Shifting interactions from offline to online doesn’t automatically translate into immediate, bankable ROI.
The real value accumulates more gradually through stronger loyalty, customer preference and sustained engagement over time.
Simplicity over sprawl in the org chart
Digital at Greif is centralized but deliberately business-led. Jatinder reports into the CIDO, yet he draws a clear distinction in how he operates.
“I keep reminding my IT peers that I am just a business guy sitting in IT,” Jatinder says.
His organization spans four core capabilities: B2B digital commerce, data and governance, user experience and an AI Foundry focused on experimentation and scale.
Data underpins everything, representing the biggest opportunity for progress. User experience, meanwhile, remains underappreciated — often mistaken for surface-level design rather than a driver of customer preference.
AI rounds out the model, approached with discipline and intent, as business ideas are translated into scalable GenAI and AI initiatives rather than isolated experiments.
Don’t do this as a technology journey. It needs to be business driven and business led. The business case should be built by business and not by technology.
— Jatinder Singh, Vice President of Digital and Data Transformation, Greif
The hardest part: Proving digital is worth the money
Organizational change is where digital ambition most often collides with reality. Funding decisions still favor tangible assets with immediate returns, while the value of digital investments is harder to quantify and slower to surface.
Even when new tools are deployed, outcomes don’t materialize on their own. Behavior has to change with them.
“If you don't really help people switch their responsibility and their jobs as a result of the new technology, then you're not going to see the benefits you want,” Jatinder says.
That’s the crux of his challenge. Technology and change management aren’t separate workstreams. They rise or fail together.
