Consumer packaged goods (CPG) giant Unilever and red-hot Google Cloud are creating an AI-powered marketing and fulfillment engine that showcases the radically different ways products and services will be created, marketed, shopped for, and purchased in the AI Economy.
While this profound co-creation partnership is surely significant for the scope of the advanced AI and cloud technology powering it, what’s even more impressive is the scale of the business-transformation vision the partnership has unleashed within Unilever.
And that expansive vision will surely inspire many others in the CPG industry — as well as retail, logistics, and many others — to accelerate not only their AI-tech initiatives but also and more importantly the business capabilities those tech efforts will unlock.
That’s because the pairing of Unilever and Google Cloud puts together two of the world’s best-known and most-influential companies: Unilever’s products are used by 3.7 billion people across the globe and its revenue is about $56 billion, while Google Cloud’s revenue grew 48% in Q4 as the company displaced Microsoft as the #1 vendor on the Cloud Wars Top 10 weekly rankings.
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For the past two or three years, the conversations about AI in the enterprise have too often been focused on large language models and their various attributes, or on the risks posed by hallucinations, or on potential security threats, or the absurd twin notions that AI data centers will boil the oceans and bankrupt the global economy.
Meanwhile, not enough attention has been paid to what the business world will look like when the awesome power of AI is brought to bear on driving stellar business outcomes, creating superb customer experiences, unleashing employees to do higher-value work, and triggering new levels of innovation and growth.
In that context, I think Google Cloud and Unilever have done the global business community a great service by focusing not on the technical arcana of their partnership but rather on the high-value outcomes it will engender. Here are some excerpts from the joint press release, and I’ve highlighted portions that I believe should frame how business leaders should think and talk about their AI initiatives:
- “The partnership will help drive growth and desirability for Unilever’s global brand portfolio – including iconic brands like Dove, Vaseline and Hellmann’s – using Google Cloud’s technologies, such as its enterprise AI platform Vertex AI, to build new capabilities in brand discovery, measurement and AI-augmented marketing. This will create a new model for how consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands are discovered and shopped, as consumer journeys shift toward more conversational and agentic experiences.”
- “By migrating its integrated data and cloud platform to Google Cloud, Unilever will build an enterprise-wide, AI-first digital backbone to generate demand faster, turn data into actionable insights, and respond to market shifts with greater agility. This foundation will also support the development of agentic workflows – intelligent systems capable of executing complex tasks across Unilever’s business processes.”
- “Technology has moved to the core of value creation at Unilever,” said Willem Uijen, Chief Supply Chain and Operations Officer, Unilever. “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.”
- Tara Brady, President, EMEA, at Google Cloud said: “In partnering with Unilever as it boldly reimagines its business processes, we are not just modernising legacy systems; we are deploying our advanced models, such as Gemini, to create a system of intelligence that reasons, learns, and acts. This will set a new standard for agility and consumer engagement in the CPG sector.”
This next level of intense collaboration with Google Cloud will enable Unilever to create “a new era of intelligence and agentic workflows” built on three fundamental capabilities:
- Agentic commerce and marketing intelligence working “across brand discovery, conversion, and measurement to ensure that Unilever remains at the forefront of shifts in technology and consumer habits” (I think that order should be flipped to say “shifts in consumer habits and technology”);
- An integrated data and cloud foundation that will create a “connected environment for scalable AI deployment across the value chain” as Unilever migrates many enterprise apps and data platforms to Google Cloud; and
- Advanced AI to “fast-track Unilever’s adoption of pioneering technologies, combining Unilever’s deep expertise with Google’s AI capabilities to sustain Unilever’s long-term competitive edge within the CPG market.”
Final Thought
As I’ve noted more than once over the past year, the primary threat to business leaders here in the AI Revolution is not their competitors, it is time. The types of fundamental, sweeping, and highly disruptive change taking place within Unilever will be measured not in years but in quarters, and sometimes in months, and now and then in weeks.
We all have a choice to make: reject incrementalism and fully commit to ensuring that, as Unilever’s Uijen says above, “technology moves to the core of value creation.” And that “as brands are increasingly discovered and chosen in environments shaped by AI, we must lead this shift.”
Or we can choose to plod along and essentially change nothing important, ruminate over whether this AI thing is really real, monitor what competitors are doing before making our own decision, and take comfort in budget limitations that take us off the hook for having to take a stand.
Choose wisely.
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