Unilever partners with Google Cloud on AI
Unilever has entered a five-year alliance with Google Cloud to use advanced AI for consumer insights and brand discovery. The partnership aims to reshape how brands engage with consumers on digital platforms, a concept described as "agentic commerce". The collaboration will focus on pioneering next-generation consumer goods technologies.
- The five-year partnership will specifically leverage Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform and its Gemini models. This collaboration is structured around three core pillars: developing agentic commerce, establishing an integrated data and cloud foundation, and accelerating the adoption of advanced AI. - A key objective is the development of "agentic workflows," which are intelligent systems designed to execute complex tasks across different business processes with more autonomy than traditional automation. - For merchants like Unilever, agentic commerce shifts the strategic focus from optimizing for human-led web browsing to ensuring their product data, availability, and fulfillment processes are easily readable and accessible to AI agents making autonomous purchasing decisions. - This initiative builds on Unilever's existing large-scale data operations, which already handle an average of 240 terabytes of data and over 3 billion transactions weekly. The company has implemented over 500 AI-based projects globally over the past decade. - The partnership involves migrating Unilever's key enterprise applications and data platforms to Google Cloud, creating a unified "AI-first digital backbone" intended to identify demand signals and respond to market changes more quickly. - The deal is championed by executives outside of marketing, including Willem Uijen, Unilever's Chief Supply Chain and Operations Officer, signaling its importance to core business operations and value creation. - This collaboration is part of a wider digital transformation strategy for Unilever, which includes moving to a 100% cloud-based infrastructure and running a dedicated AI research hub in Toronto to explore new applications.
