How Unilever is building an AI-first enterprise at scale

Ashwani Kumar — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:45:54 +0000

How Unilever is building an AI-first enterprise at scale

Sam Kini, Unilever’s Chief Digital & Technology Officer

In this Q&A, Unilever’s Chief Digital & Technology Officer, Sam Kini, explains how Unilever is applying AI at scale across the business value chain to drive real impact for our 3.7 billion consumers.

What defines an AI-first organisation, and what gives Unilever a competitive advantage in this new era?

Becoming AI-first is one of the three foundational pillars of Unilever’s business transformation. For us, technology is at the core of value creation, with AI as the digital backbone, helping us generate demand faster, turn data into actionable consumer insights, respond to market shifts with greater agility and unlock value company-wide.

At Unilever, we apply AI across three distinct areas:

To drive growth and build the foundations for the future of commerce
To build an intelligent enterprise across the value chain, embedding AI across our core processes and the way we work
To equip our people with the right tools and make AI an essential part of everyday work

Our competitive advantage is built on trust – in our brands, our customer relationships and our data. This gives us a strong foundation to innovate, as consumers already recognise and value what we stand for.

How is AI changing the future of commerce?

Some 3.7 billion people use our products every day, that’s roughly half the world’s population.

But the traditional path to purchase is changing. AI is increasingly shaping the entire shopping journey – making the experience more agentic and conversational – and transforming how people discover, compare and buy our brands.

Research from McKinsey shows that 50% of shoppers use AI to discover and compare products, while Bain & Company estimates that the US agentic commerce market could reach $300–500 billion (€260–433 billion) by 2030, making up roughly 15–25% of e-commerce.

And that means rethinking the way we work, from innovation and product content to fulfilment, structured data and retailer collaboration.

To serve today’s consumers, our brands need to be designed for both people and algorithms, so they become the most trusted answer in an AI‑mediated marketplace.

How are you bringing this AI-first strategy to life?

We’re turning intelligence into a growth engine. AI-ready data is closing the gap between insight and action, helping us generate demand faster, be more agile in our response to market shifts and create a differentiating competitive advantage that’s delivering impact across our value chain.

3 ways AI is driving value-creation

AI-powered digital twins in Unilever’s factories are cutting energy consumption, optimising ingredients and delivering superior quality for our products across our global manufacturing network. At our personal care factory in the US, it’s helping boost production capacity by 10%.
A $270 million (€234 million) digital-first, AI-powered global innovation centre focused on Beauty, Wellbeing and Personal Care Power Brands is under development in the US. This adds to our €100 million investment to expand our in-house fragrance capabilities and £150 million (€174 million) investment in Port Sunlight.
AI is reinventing our marketing lifecycle, delivering insights and optimising performance by rapidly analysing consumer responses to creative messaging. Dove’s #ChangeTheCompliment campaign, for example, went live across 25 markets with 100+ pieces of content and achieved 94% positive sentiment.

How is AI reshaping how Unilever builds, measures and maintains trust?

We have iconic household brands that are part of everyday life for millions of consumers. That trust, combined with our scale, is a unique advantage as we move into the AI age. AI is not a substitute for product quality, science or consumer trust. It’s raising the bar.

Our innovation process has always started with the consumer and understanding their needs. Today, our Beauty & Wellbeing R&D teams use AI to analyse up to 1,000 data sources every month, drawn from social, search and retailers, tapping into consumer behaviours that enable product development teams to act quickly on emerging trends.

Unilever’s success has long been driven by world-class science at the heart of our brands. And today, demonstrated superiority and evidence-backed credibility matter more than ever to both humans and algorithms. We are turning strong, structured data into a machine-readable engine. For example, in Beauty & Wellbeing, our claims generation process is now 75% faster.

What do organisations need to do to thrive in an AI-first future?

At Unilever, we are combining the pace of innovation with strong governance to deploy AI responsibly at scale.

Success in the AI era requires both speed and care, which is why we are taking a holistic approach across our people, culture and technology on how we deploy it.

As technology becomes widespread, it’s people and processes that become the real differentiators, underpinned by leaders who role-model this transformation.

To date, we’ve trained over 40,000 of our employees to use AI. Putting the I in AI strengthens both business performance and the way we work every day.

The future of enterprise AI will not be defined by the technology itself. It will be defined by what we, as humans, choose to do with it. And that means preparing our organisations to scale AI with trust, speed and impact.

Unilever is building an AI-first enterprise at scale by embedding machine learning and generative AI into its foundational business processes. Key initiatives include forming a strategic Google Cloud Partnership and investing in a $270 million AI-driven innovation centre to accelerate scientific and product design. [1, 2, 3, 4]

The company is modernizing across three core pillars: [5]

1. Unified Digital Backbone

Cloud Migration: By migrating core enterprise applications to Google Cloud , Unilever is connecting massive amounts of operational data into a single, machine-readable format to guide data-driven decisions.
Agentic Workflows: The company is utilizing Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and Gemini to develop multiple AI agents that automate and streamline tasks across supply chain sourcing and corporate operations. [5, 7, 8]

2. Marketing & Consumer Insights (“Desire at Scale”)

Social-First Strategy: Rather than traditional research-first approaches, Unilever tests campaigns directly on platforms like TikTok and Facebook, allowing them to create ad variants in as little as two hours.
Creative Speed: Using tools like NVIDIA Omniverse, Unilever creates digital product twins, speeding up content creation by 50% and reducing costs.
Campaign Optimization: AI helps the company rapidly analyze consumer responses to creative messaging to iterate campaigns. For example, Dove’s #ChangeTheCompliment used AI to achieve 94% positive sentiment across 25 markets. [1, 11]

3. Smart Manufacturing & Product R&D

Digital Factories: Unilever is using AI-powered digital twins in its factories to optimize ingredients and reduce energy consumption. This technology boosted capacity by 10% in their North Carolina facility and helped the Tinsukia factory join the World Economic Forum’s Global Lighthouse Network.
Faster Formulation: By using algorithms to simulate biological interactions and consumer feedback, R&D teams are compressing product development timelines. For instance, Knorr was able to halve recipe development time using digital testing. [13, 14]

4. Culture & People

Employee Empowerment: Recognizing that people are the true differentiators, Unilever has trained over 40,000 employees on AI tools .
Operational Efficiency: Integrating AI into daily tasks—such as its AI-assisted Smart Briefing pilot—has reduced the time it takes to complete projects while significantly increasing brief quality. [1, 13, 15]

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