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.
