Who we are…
and the genesis of BevSage
Dr Darren Oemcke, Co-Founder & Creator (Hydra Consulting)
BevSage had three creation moments.
The first was exploring AI to see how we could improve our sector coaching and training. We built ‘Storytelling’ and ‘Pitching’ tools that gave automated feedback on first drafts and made improvement recommendations. This allowed our workshops to focus on refining ideas, going beyond the basics.
The second was through project work for Wines of Western Australia. We created regional market entry reports that combined market insights, target trade partners, target consumers, consumption occasions and activation recommendations by market. With our commercial advice plus AI we could create practical products that SMEs could pick-up and run with.
The third came when Distillers SA asked us to develop market entry materials. Rather than creating static materials, we decided to build a suite of quality AI-powered tools covering all aspects of market growth, that we would deliver at prices that SMEs could afford.
I am proud to have turned these into the BevSage 2.0 suite of products and services.
Oliver Bischof, Co-Founder & Tech Lead (Moots Technology)
We got together to work out what we could do with AI that would both help our customers and build our capability to deliver on the opportunities presented by AI.
My business, Moots Technology, had just built the TonsleyAI platform for building corporate AI systems. Ron and Darren at Hydra Consulting were working on how they make their wine, spirits and drinks knowledge more available to more businesses.
We adapted TonsleyAI into a multi-company platform to meet the needs of BevSage’s emerging approach of supplying growth support to as many beverage producers as possible in a very cost effective way. It has been rewarding getting AI beyond experimentation to become part of everyday business.
For me, the value isn't in AI alone. It's in combining AI with business knowledge, trusted data and existing systems so people can make better decisions, faster. The pattern in BevSage is to find an enabling step in business growth, hand it to the model, and free the people for the part only people can do.
We are enabling beverage businesses to do what they do best by taking some of the load.
Ron van Buuren, Co-Founder & Finance Guy (Hydra Consulting)
I felt that we needed to adapt Hydra Consulting to thrive in an era of AI. For the last few years we have been working on understanding how our business would need to adapt to the emergence of AI, it’s pace of change and to take advantage of the opportunities presented.
We spent a lot of time with Oli brainstorming to find ways we could better help our customers grow and make more of our expertise available to them through their interactions with AI tools. Beverage growth quickly became the focus because we were working on ways to deliver lead generation, pricing, research, pitch coaching, sales, marketing and growth strategy to a range of clients in wine, spirits and packaged water at the time.
I love the way BevSage 2.0 combines self-service AI tools for companies that want to be independent, Deep Dives for companies that want help with just one thing, and AI supported coaching for others. It feels like a fantastic implementation of AI but very human at the same time. Making this level of expertise available to both our big and small clients is probably the most exciting part of the BevSage journey for me.
Our journey has just begun and BevSage is already evolving and growing.