Google Cloud and Unilever have announced a five-year strategic partnership to enhance Unilever’s operations and marketing strategy.
By implementing Google’s AI and Cloud technologies across the consumer goods company’s operations, the partnership will aim to support more personalized and conversational interactions with consumers.
This aligns with Unilever’s plans to transform customer brand engagement through agent-led experiences and smart systems that can assist in shopping and discovery.
Tara Brady, President for EMEA at Google Cloud, highlights how this partnership will help Unilever accelerate its shift beyond infrastructure modernization and toward AI-driven marketing and customer experience.
“In partnering with Unilever as it boldly reimagines its business processes, we are not just modernizing legacy systems; we are deploying our advanced models, such as Gemini, to create a system of intelligence that reasons, learns, and acts,” she explained.
“This will set a new standard for agility and consumer engagement in the CPG sector.”
Enhancing Operations with Google AI Tools
Unilever plans to apply Google Cloud’s AI tools, such as the Vertex AI platform and other large models like Gemini, to improve how it markets brands and analyzes performance.
The partnership will aim to increase the number of people finding its products, measure market effectiveness, and deliver more personalized online experiences.
This will involve developing agentic workflows that can carry out complex tasks automatically, combining data, AI reasoning, and automated actions across different functions in Unilever’s operations.
This includes generating insights from data without inputting manual steps and responding quickly to changes in market demand or conditions, reducing routine work.
Unilever also plans to adapt to changing consumer behavior, particularly in AI-driven and conversational shopping environments, by aligning its systems with Google’s AI capabilities to enable new ways for customers to discover and select products online.
The collaboration will focus on improving three areas to enhance Unilever’s operations:
Agentic Commerce and Marketing Intelligence
Unilever plans to analyze consumer data in real-time and identify patterns in search, browsing, and buying behaviors to optimize product discovery effectively in search engines, retail platforms, and conversational interfaces.
This also includes introducing agentic systems for multi-step marketing tasks and enhancing market measure measurement through automated insights.
By making marketing more automated, data-driven, and responsive to changes in consumer behavior, this will modernize Unilever’s marketing strategy in digital channels.
An Integrated Data and Cloud Foundation
Unilever plans to consolidate data systems and core applications into a unified cloud infrastructure by building a single, connected technology backbone that supports large-scale AI use and faster decision-making across the company.
By creating a centralized data ecosystem that connects marketing, supply chain, R&D, and sales, this improves overall data accessibility, security, and processing speed.
Advanced AI
Unilever plans to improve business operations by expanding the use of AI tools across functions, adopting Google’s AI platforms and large models to support analytics, forecasting, and automation.
This will also include combining Unilever’s consumer and brand expertise with Google’s AI research capabilities for increased efficiency, improved insights, and maintaining competitiveness in the market.
By developing systems that can reason, predict, and act with minimal human intervention, Unilever can increase deployment of AI solutions in marketing, operations, and product development.
In return for utilizing its AI products and capabilities, Unilever will transition its central data environment and business applications onto Google Cloud’s platform.
This will create an enterprise-wide, AI-first digital backbone that functions as a unified, cloud-based foundation that can support data use by different teams and systems across the company.
Willem Uijen, Chief Supply Chain and Operations Officer at Unilever, explains that AI and cloud technology are now central to how Unilever plans to grows, compete, and interacts with consumers, with this partnership helping them to accelerate that transition across the whole organization.
“Technology has moved to the core of value creation at Unilever,” he said.
“As brands are increasingly discovered and chosen in environments shaped by AI, we must lead this shift.
“This collaboration with Google Cloud sets a new level in how technology can power commerce and growth in the fast-moving consumer goods industry, ensuring Unilever is agile, fit for the future, and equipped to unlock value at every level of the company.”
Aligning Agent-Led Systems With Changing Consumer Behavior
Unilever plans to utilize this partnership to transform its consumer brand engagement through agent-led experiences to support its goals for enhanced customer experiences.
As customer expectations shift to modern digital tools and platforms for product discovery, they expect faster answers, personalized relevance, and seamless interactions across search, social and ecommerce.
By implementing AI-driven systems, brands can now respond in natural language and provide recommendations without customers needing to manually research.
Instilling personalized experiences into the customer journey can also increase engagement and reduce decision fatigue by offering recommendations that reflect individual preferences.
Consumers can also receive efficient responses, as improved data integration and intelligent systems now allow Unilever to analyze signals from consumer behavior more rapidly, allowing marketing teams to adjust campaigns or offer new suggestions when needed to create a responsive user experience.
By advancing analytics, generative AI, and integrated data to make interactions with its brands more relevant, efficient, and personalized, Unilever can further align customer experiences with how consumers want to shop today.
