AI is going to transform every workplace, and that makes a lot of people afraid.

At the first live taping of The Twin Cities Business Show, we asked Jaime Montemayor, the Chief Digital, Technology & Transformation Officer at General Mills, about this fear.

No, he does not think AI is going to wipe out millions of jobs – but he thinks it will change them. It will change how businesses work, and the people that can use it to reinvent business processes will drive a lot of value in the months and years to come.

He also believes that it will create new categories of jobs that don’t yet exist. If you want to drive change at your organization with AI, you need to have a human in the loop. Jaime shared that at General Mills, there are processes that require more human touch than others, but the bigger the decision, the more critical it is to have someone making the final call.

Their company has overhauled its tech stack and built an internal AI tool called MillsAI which contains a toolbox of approved, secured tools that their employees can use.

Finally, he shared that cats are one of the biggest growth areas for General Mills. Cat ownership is growing faster than any other pet in the U.S., and Jaime shares how the company is capitalizing. They expanded from human food to pet food with the $8 billion purchase of Blue Buffalo in April 2018, and increased their footprint by buying Tiki Cat for $1.45 billion in late 2024.