The way people buy shampoo, mayonnaise, and deodorant is about to change — radically. And one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies has decided it can’t afford to wait and see how it plays out.
Unilever, the $60 billion multinational behind Dove, Hellmann’s, Vaseline, Ben & Jerry’s, and hundreds of other brands used by 3.7 billion people daily, announced today a landmark five-year partnership with Google Cloud to transform itself into what it’s calling an “AI-first” enterprise. The deal — announced Monday, February 17 — will see Unilever migrate its entire integrated data and cloud platform to Google Cloud and deploy Google’s Vertex AI and Gemini models across brand discovery, marketing measurement, and the emerging world of agentic commerce: AI systems that don’t just recommend products to shoppers, but autonomously research, compare, and complete purchases on their behalf.
If that sounds like science fiction, the reality is closer than you think. And Unilever is betting its competitive future on getting there first.
What Unilever Is Actually Building
At the core of the partnership is a straightforward but profound architectural shift. By migrating its integrated data and cloud platform to Google Cloud, Unilever will build an enterprise-wide, AI-first digital backbone to generate demand faster, turn data into actionable insights, and respond to market shifts with greater agility.
That “digital backbone” isn’t a metaphor. It’s the literal foundation on which Unilever plans to operate in a world where shopping is increasingly mediated by conversational AI — chatbots like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, or voice assistants embedded in smart speakers and cars — rather than traditional search engines or retailer websites.
The partnership focuses on three pillars. First, next-generation agentic commerce and marketing intelligence: using Google Cloud technologies like Vertex AI to build new capabilities in brand discovery, conversion, and measurement. Second, an integrated data and cloud foundation to support scalable AI deployment across Unilever’s global operations. Third, accelerated adoption of advanced AI, combining Unilever’s deep consumer expertise with Google’s AI capabilities to sustain long-term competitive advantage.
Here’s what that means in practice. Imagine you’re standing in your kitchen and you ask your smart assistant: “I’m out of mayonnaise — order me a jar, sustainable brand, arrives by Friday.” In a traditional e-commerce world, you’d manually search Amazon, read reviews, compare prices, and click checkout. In the agentic commerce world Unilever is preparing for, an AI agent does all of that for you. It scans multiple retailers, evaluates your preferences and purchase history, finds the best option — maybe Hellmann’s, maybe a competitor — and completes the transaction autonomously, all within seconds.
The existential question for Unilever: when the AI is making the purchase decision, how do you ensure it picks your brand?
That’s the problem this partnership is designed to solve.
Why Now? The Collapse of Traditional Commerce and the Rise of Autonomous Shopping
To understand the urgency behind this deal, you need to understand what’s happening to the $3.45 trillion global consumer packaged goods market. Growth is slowing. The average organic growth rate across 11 major global CPG players fell from 3.9% in FY 2024 to 1.5% in Q1 2025, with volume growth turning negative — from +0.5% in 2024 to -1.0% in the first quarter of 2025. Consumers are downtrading, delaying purchases, and reducing pantry loading due to inflation fatigue. Six of the 11 largest CPG companies posted flat or declining volumes in the first quarter of this year.
At the same time, the way people discover and buy products is shifting beneath their feet. According to McKinsey research published in October 2025, even under moderate scenarios, AI agents could mediate $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030. That’s not a fringe use case. That’s the mainstream.
Here’s how agentic commerce actually works, according to industry definitions. Unlike traditional e-commerce experiences — which require a person to manually search for products, compare options, read reviews, and complete checkout step by step — agentic commerce shifts much of that work to AI agents. AI-powered shopping assistants proactively gather requirements, scan multiple retailers in real time, evaluate products against user preferences and constraints, and make purchases or recommendations on the user’s behalf.
The technology infrastructure to support this is no longer theoretical. OpenAI’s Operator, launched in January 2025 and now integrated into ChatGPT, uses agents to help users automate tasks like booking travel and restaurant reservations. OpenAI announced an Agentic Commerce Protocol, co-developed with Stripe, which allows users to complete purchases within ChatGPT without leaving the chat. Shopify is developing an agentic shopping infrastructure that allows agents to tap into its catalog and build carts across merchants. Amazon, Google, PayPal, Mastercard, and Visa are all developing agentic shopping services.
The shift is happening now. And companies that aren’t positioned to be discoverable, recommendable, and purchasable through AI agents risk becoming invisible.
The CPG Dilemma: When the Algorithm Becomes the Gatekeeper
The problem Unilever faces is structural. Consumer packaged goods companies have spent the past two decades mastering digital advertising — Facebook ads, Google search, influencer marketing, programmatic display. But in an agentic commerce world, those playbooks break.
Why? Because the consumer never sees the ad.
When a user asks an AI agent to “reorder shampoo,” the agent doesn’t browse Instagram or watch YouTube ads. It evaluates structured product data — ingredients, reviews, price, delivery speed, sustainability credentials — and makes a recommendation based on logic, not brand recall. The expensive brand-building machinery that CPG companies have relied on for decades becomes, at best, one input among many in an algorithm’s decision tree.
The partnership is structured around three core pillars: next-generation agentic commerce and marketing intelligence; a fully integrated data and cloud foundation to support scalable AI deployment; and accelerated adoption of advanced AI technologies to maintain Unilever’s competitive edge.
“Technology has moved to the core of value creation at Unilever,” said Willem Uijen, Unilever’s Chief Supply Chain and Operations Officer. “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.”
Translation: if Unilever doesn’t become AI-native, it risks being outcompeted by companies that are.
Tara Brady, President of Google Cloud EMEA, framed the partnership in even more transformative terms. “In partnering with Unilever as it boldly reimagines its business processes, we are not just modernizing legacy systems,” Brady said. “We are deploying our advanced models, such as Gemini, to create a system of intelligence that reasons, learns, and acts. This will set a new standard for agility and consumer engagement in the CPG sector.”
What Unilever Gets — and What It Risks
The partnership gives Unilever access to some of the most advanced AI infrastructure available today. Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, which serves as the backbone of the deal, is an enterprise-grade AI development environment that allows companies to build, train, and deploy machine learning models at scale. Unilever will use it to create what the companies are calling “AI-augmented marketing” — systems that can dynamically adjust messaging, targeting, and creative based on real-time consumer behaviour.
More critically, Unilever will be able to integrate its brands into the emerging protocols and standards that govern agentic commerce. Google is one of the co-developers of the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), a framework for how AI agents authenticate and execute transactions on behalf of users. By aligning with Google Cloud early, Unilever positions itself to be natively compatible with the AI shopping ecosystem as it scales.
But the partnership also carries risks. Unilever is effectively outsourcing a significant portion of its technology strategy to a single vendor. If Google Cloud experiences outages, security breaches, or strategic pivots, Unilever’s operations are exposed. The deal also locks Unilever into Google’s AI model architecture — Vertex AI and Gemini — at a time when the field is rapidly evolving and competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and others are releasing increasingly capable systems.
There’s also the question of whether consumers actually want this future. For fashion, gifts, home decor — things where discovery is part of the value — many consumers may not want an agent to shortcut that process. The jury is still out on which purchase categories will shift to autonomous agents and which will remain resolutely human-driven.
The Broader Industry Context: Everyone Is Scrambling
Unilever is not moving in isolation. The entire CPG industry is in the midst of what analysts are calling a digital transformation arms race.
Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez described the company’s strategy as “creating a future fit model for how our brands are discovered and shopped” during the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call. “We are making our organization fit for the AI age, transforming every link in the value chain, particularly around the consumer,” Fernandez said. The company adopted a “go wide and go deep” AI strategy in 2024, training more than 23,000 employees on generative AI tools and deploying more than 500 AI projects globally.
Competitors are pursuing similar strategies. Coty, the beauty conglomerate, announced a collaboration with OpenAI in late 2025 to deploy ChatGPT Enterprise across its global business. Procter & Gamble, Unilever’s largest rival, has been using AI for personalized offers and reported a 7% increase in e-commerce sales driven by AI-powered marketing. Nestlé has been leveraging AI and e-commerce to double consumer data collection and enhance engagement.
The financial stakes are enormous. The global consumer packaged goods market is estimated at $3,450.12 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $4,235.01 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 4.2%. But that aggregate growth masks a deeper structural challenge: traditional volume growth is stalling, and the companies that can’t adapt to AI-mediated commerce risk becoming margin-compressed commodity suppliers in a world where the AI chooses the winner.
The Unanswered Question: Will Consumers Trust the Agent?
Perhaps the most important question this partnership raises is one that neither Unilever nor Google Cloud can answer yet: will consumers actually delegate purchasing authority to AI agents at the scale these companies are betting on?
There are encouraging early signals. Checkout.com research from December 2025 found that 47% of consumers say they would use an AI agent for boring or repetitive purchases, with over two-thirds of shoppers aged 25-44 willing to delegate repetitive purchases to AI. Grocery staples, household essentials, and personal care products — exactly the categories Unilever dominates — are among the most obvious candidates for autonomous purchasing.
But trust is fragile. When an AI agent is spending your money, the trust equation becomes abstract, filtered through layers of data, automation, and institutional frameworks. Any high-profile failure — an agent that charges the wrong amount, orders the wrong product, or leaks payment information — could set adoption back years.
Unilever and Google are betting that the convenience will outweigh the risk. They’re also betting that by building the infrastructure early, they can help set the standards that govern how agentic commerce works, rather than being forced to adapt to standards set by others.
What This Means for the Future of Shopping
If this partnership succeeds, the implications extend well beyond Unilever’s bottom line.
The deal represents one of the clearest signals yet that the consumer internet as we know it — search engines, banner ads, influencer marketing, social commerce — may be giving way to something fundamentally different. A world where AI agents act as the primary interface between consumers and brands. Where product discovery happens through natural language conversation rather than keyword search. Where purchase decisions are delegated to software that reasons, evaluates, and transacts autonomously.
For Unilever’s 96,000 employees, the shift is already underway. The company has trained nearly a quarter of its global workforce on generative AI tools. It has deployed over 500 AI projects. And now, with this Google Cloud partnership, it’s rebuilding the digital foundation of the entire enterprise to be AI-native from the ground up.
Whether this proves visionary or premature will depend on a question no one can answer with certainty yet: how quickly will consumers hand the keys to their shopping carts over to machines?
Unilever is betting the answer is “sooner than you think.” And it’s spending the next five years making sure that when they do, its brands are the ones the AI picks.
