Why Unilever is Placing a Five-Year AI Bet on Google Cloud

The collaboration will see Unilever build an AI-first digital backbone on Google Cloud and scale tools such as Vertex AI and Gemini for marketing consumer goods.

Both companies aim to fuse marketing science with AI to drive growth and desirability across Unilever’s global portfolio, including Dove, Ben & Jerry’s and Magnum.

The ambition of the partnership is to move beyond pilots and proof-of-concepts toward production-grade systems that can act across the value chain.

“Technology has moved to the core of value creation at Unilever,” says Willem Uijen, Chief Supply Chain and Operations Officer at 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.”

What’s at the heart of the deal?

Unilever wants to merge its integrated data with Google’s cloud platform, to create a governed environment for AI at scale.

By consolidating first- and third-party data and standardising governance, Unilever expects faster demand generation and greater resilience in a volatile market.

That foundation is designed to support “agentic” workflows, which are intelligent systems capable of planning and executing multistep tasks across marketing.

In practice, this could mean AI agents that autonomously orchestrate campaigns in real time while keeping employees in the loop for oversight.

“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,” says Tara Brady, President, EMEA at Google Cloud.

“This will set a new standard for agility and consumer engagement in the CPG sector.”

Brand discovery

Using Vertex AI, Unilever plans to build new capabilities in brand discovery, anticipating a world where CPG brands are surfaced and shopped through assistants that can compare attributes and recommend across channels.

For consumers, this change will bring more privacy-conscious experiences, and for marketers it will bring clearer performance signals.

Three focus areas for the partnership

The collaboration rests on three pillars.

First, Unilever and Google Cloud will build agentic commerce and marketing intelligence to advance discovery, conversion and measurement across AI-mediated touchpoints, including conversational interfaces.

Second, Unilever will establish a unified data and cloud foundation by transitioning core enterprise applications and data platforms to Google Cloud, creating a single governed backbone to scale AI consistently across functions.

Third, the partnership will accelerate the adoption of advanced AI by combining Unilever’s category expertise with Google Cloud’s models and tooling, including Vertex AI and Gemini, moving AI from experimentation to competitive advantage.

For Unilever, the bet is that a unified, AI-first architecture can coordinate complex tasks and compress decision cycles while upholding strict data governance and responsible AI principles.

The engagement is a flagship example of how an AI platform can power production-grade transformation within one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, which benefits Google Cloud.