Unilever partners with Google Cloud in a 5-year deal to become AI-first consumer goods company

Consumer goods giant Unilever has signed a five-year partnership with Google Cloud to transform how it markets and sells products using artificial intelligence. The deal will see brands like Dove, Vaseline, and Hellmann’s lean heavily on Google’s AI tools to change how consumers discover and buy everyday items.

Unilever plans to use Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform to build new capabilities in brand discovery, marketing measurement, and AI-powered customer interactions. The company is betting that shopping behaviours are shifting toward conversational and AI-driven experiences, such as asking an AI assistant to recommend a shampoo rather than scrolling through a store website.

As part of the agreement, Unilever will migrate its entire data and cloud infrastructure to Google Cloud, creating what the company calls an “AI-first digital backbone” that can process information faster and respond to market changes more quickly.

The partnership also aims to develop agentic workflows, automated systems that can handle complex business tasks with minimal human intervention.

Why Unilever, a consumer company, is betting big on AI

For a company that sells products in over 190 countries and reaches 3.7 billion people daily, staying ahead of how consumers shop matters enormously. Unilever generated €50.5 billion in sales in 2025, but the way people find and buy consumer goods is changing fast.

“Technology has moved to the core of value creation at Unilever,” said Willem Uijen, the company’s chief supply chain and operations officer. “As brands are increasingly discovered and chosen in environments shaped by AI, we must lead this shift.”

The partnership reflects a broader trend in consumer packaged goods: companies realising that AI isn’t just a marketing buzzword but a fundamental shift in how customers interact with products.

When someone asks a voice assistant or chatbot for a recommendation, traditional advertising matters less than whether your brand shows up in that AI-generated response.

The three areas of focus for both companies

The collaboration breaks down into three main parts. First, building next-generation marketing tools that help Unilever brands appear and convert in AI-driven shopping environments.

Second, migrate all Unilever’s enterprise applications and data platforms to Google Cloud for a unified infrastructure. Third, accelerate Unilever’s adoption of advanced AI technologies, including Google’s Gemini models.

Tara Brady, Google Cloud’s president for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, says the partnership goes beyond modernising old systems. “We are deploying our advanced models to create a system of intelligence that reasons, learns, and acts,” she said. The goal is to set a new standard for how consumer goods companies operate in an AI-driven market.

What this means practically: Unilever wants AI to handle more decisions across its business, from predicting which products will sell where, to personalising marketing messages and automating supply chain adjustments based on real-time demand data.

The deal positions Unilever as one of the first major consumer goods companies to commit this deeply to AI transformation at an enterprise level.

Similar read: Google’s parent company, Alphabet plans $32bn raise to dominate AI race

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