Unilever Partners with Google Cloud on AI

- This partnership builds on a long-standing relationship, which includes a 2020 initiative to use Google Cloud and satellite imagery for sustainably sourcing commodities like palm oil, aiming to achieve a deforestation-free supply chain. - Unilever has already implemented over 500 AI projects globally, establishing an AI research hub in Toronto to drive productivity and business growth. The company's network handles an average of 240TB of data weekly across more than 3 billion transactions. - In its Personal Care division, AI has led to an 8% increase in equipment effectiveness and a 20% reduction in waste at its Hefei, China factory. Furthermore, over 75% of office-based Personal Care employees are now regular users of personal AI productivity tools. - Through AI-powered marketing, Unilever has been able to produce some content twice as fast and at half the cost. For its Beauty & Wellbeing brands, using AI to create "digital twins" of products has increased savings by 55% and accelerated content delivery by 65%. - The collaboration will utilize Google's Vertex AI platform to create "agentic workflows," which are intelligent systems capable of executing complex tasks across Unilever's business processes, from marketing to supply chain management. - In a previous AI-driven supply chain project with Walmart Mexico, Unilever achieved over 98% on-shelf availability for its products, leading to significant category growth and reduced inventory in less than a year. - The partnership aims to accelerate "agentic commerce," where AI agents act on behalf of consumers to research, negotiate, and purchase products, potentially integrating with smart home devices that could, for example, automatically re-order products. - The collaboration is led by key executives including Willem Uijen, Unilever's Chief Supply Chain and Operations Officer, and Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, who has overseen Google Cloud's significant growth in the enterprise market.