Unilever designs and deploys agents at scale with Google Cloud AI
Summary
In this brief customer story from Google Cloud Next '26, Unilever representatives describe how the company is leveraging Google Cloud AI to serve its 3.7 billion daily consumers with greater personalization and operational efficiency. The session centers on Unilever's strategic partnership with Google Cloud, framing it as essential to the company's core growth strategy — specifically enabling personalization at scale and desire generation at scale across a global enterprise.
A key focus is Unilever's use of a multi-agentic solution co-created with its internal Horizon 3 Labs team. Built on Google Cloud technologies including Gemini Enterprise, the Agent Development Kit (ADK), and underlying Gemini models, this solution orchestrates multiple AI agents through a single user interface. The primary business application is in procurement: the system enables buying colleagues to complete analysis and sourcing decisions in minutes rather than days, enabling smarter and faster competitive buying decisions.
The session also highlights Unilever's broader digital backbone powered by Google Cloud, which connects the business end-to-end. This infrastructure supports demand generation, provides early access to advanced AI and large language models, and enables stronger data-sharing partnerships with retailers. The speaker responsible for operationalizing this vision emphasizes that the agentic foundations are being architected from the outset for performance, scale, security, and observability. The overarching message is that Unilever views AI not as a tool but as a growth engine — turning intelligence into competitive advantage across one of the world's largest consumer goods companies.
Key Takeaways
- •Unilever's multi-agentic procurement solution reduces sourcing analysis time from days to minutes by orchestrating multiple AI agents through a single interface.
- •Building agentic AI foundations with security, observability, and scalability in mind from the outset is critical for safe enterprise-wide deployment.
- •Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise and ADK provide the core infrastructure for orchestrating complex multi-agent workflows at scale.
- •A strong digital backbone that connects the business end-to-end is a prerequisite for fast, enterprise-wide AI deployment.
- •AI partnerships with retailers — enabled by smarter data connections — can drive mutual growth beyond internal efficiency gains.
- •Framing AI as a 'growth engine' rather than a cost-saving tool positions it as a strategic differentiator in the CPG industry.
Transcript
At Uni Liver, we serve 3.7 billion people every day with our products. We need to understand these individuals at a unique level. And that's what the partnership with Google Cloud allows us to do. It's about personalization at scale, desire at scale, and that's very unique and it's at the core of our strategy. We are connecting our business end to end for faster AI deployment across the enterprise. This means using AI to supercharge demand generation, get early access to advanced AI and large la...
