Unilever, Google Cloud Enter Five-Year AI Collaboration to Boost Consumer Goods Innovation

Unilever has begun a major change in how it builds and manages its global consumer brands, following a new five-year agreement with Google Cloud. The partnership is designed to push the company further into artificial intelligence and reshape how shoppers discover products such as Dove, Vaseline, and Hellmann’s. The move reflects Unilever’s belief that buyers are increasingly choosing items through conversational tools rather than traditional online browsing.

The company plans to rely heavily on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI to improve brand visibility, strengthen marketing insights, and support AI-driven customer interactions. Executives believe shoppers will soon prefer asking digital assistants for a recommendation instead of scrolling through endless product pages. This shift is already changing how global brands approach discovery and advertising.

Unilever has also committed to moving all of its data systems and cloud infrastructure onto Google Cloud. The goal is to create a faster, more flexible digital network capable of reacting to real-time trends. This shift will help build what the company calls an AI-first backbone, a foundation that can support automated decision-making and complex digital workflows.

A Strategy Shaped by Changing Consumer Habits

With products sold in more than 190 countries, the company serves around 3.7 billion people daily. Unilever generated €50.5 billion in sales in 2025, yet the digital marketplace around it continues to evolve at high speed. Voice assistants, chatbots, and AI-powered search are changing how people discover brands, leaving companies with no choice but to keep up.

“Technology has moved to the core of value creation at Unilever,” said Willem Uijen, the company’s chief supply chain and operations officer. He added that as consumer discovery becomes shaped by AI-driven environments, the company intends to guide that transition rather than follow it.

The collaboration with Google Cloud focuses on three priorities. The first is building new marketing tools that help the company’s brands stand out when consumers rely on AI to make buying decisions. The second is shifting all enterprise applications into a single cloud system for consistency and speed. The third aims to speed up the company’s broader use of advanced AI, including Gemini models.

Tara Brady, Google Cloud’s president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, described the partnership as more than a technical upgrade. “We are deploying our advanced models to create a system of intelligence that reasons, learns, and acts,” she said. The goal is to raise the standard for how global consumer goods businesses operate in an AI-led market.