Unilever partners with Google Cloud
Unilever has announced a five-year partnership with Google Cloud to pioneer “agentic commerce” and harness AI for consumer experience and operational efficiency. The collaboration aims to build scalable digital innovation capabilities across Unilever’s global brand portfolio. The goal is to use Google Cloud’s AI to deliver personalized, context-aware commerce and marketing.
- "Agentic commerce" refers to the use of autonomous AI agents to manage a consumer's entire purchasing journey, from product discovery and comparison to making the actual purchase, often with minimal human input. This goes beyond chatbots by empowering the AI to take action and complete complex tasks. - The partnership will utilize Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform to build new marketing and brand discovery capabilities. Unilever also plans to migrate key enterprise applications and data platforms to Google Cloud, creating what it calls an "AI-first digital backbone." - This collaboration is not Unilever's first with Google Cloud. In October 2023, the two companies partnered with Accenture to launch "My Unilever," an app designed to digitally connect Unilever's 53,000+ factory-based employees using Google Workspace and Appsheet. - While this deal focuses on Google Cloud, Unilever's broader cloud strategy is multi-provider. The company completed a move to be 100% cloud-based in 2023, with Microsoft Azure reportedly handling the bulk of its back-end factory and warehousing infrastructure. - Google is increasingly targeting the retail and CPG sectors with specialized AI tools. Offerings include "Google Agentspace" for building intelligent agents, enhanced "Vertex AI Search for commerce," and generative media models like Imagen (text-to-image) and Veo (text-to-video) for content creation. - Unilever has been actively integrating AI for several years, with over 500 AI projects implemented in the last decade. One internal example is "U-Studio," an AI content intelligence platform powered by IBM Watson that reportedly reduced content costs by 30% and sped up campaign turnaround by 50%. - The CPG industry is rapidly adopting AI, with 66% of global firms already deploying generative AI tools for functions like marketing and R&D. Competitors like Danone have used AI to increase demand forecast accuracy to over 90%, while Mondelēz International uses it to shorten new snack idea launch timelines by up to 80%.
