Unilever has signed a five-year partnership with Google Cloud to move enterprise applications and data platforms onto Google Cloud and to use Google’s Vertex AI and Gemini models across marketing, brand discovery and internal workflows.
The aim of the partnership is to keep Unilever’s brands visible as consumer journeys shift toward conversational and “agentic” buying experiences.
What Unilever and Google Cloud said they will build
In its release, Unilever said the partnership has three pillars: “agentic commerce and marketing intelligence” across discovery, conversion and measurement, an “integrated data and cloud foundation” via migration to Google Cloud, and broader adoption of Google’s AI capabilities.
Unilever said that by moving its integrated data and cloud platform, it plans to create an “enterprise-wide, AI-first digital backbone” that supports scalable AI deployment and “agentic workflows” that can execute complex tasks across business processes.
The announcement lands as Unilever is reporting €50.5 billion in 2025 turnover on a continuing-operations basis following its ice cream demerger.
Why the “discovery” channel is the stated driver
Unilever’s release tied the partnership to how consumers find and choose products. “As brands are increasingly discovered and chosen in environments shaped by AI, we must lead this shift,” Unilever chief supply chain and operations officer Willem Uijen said.
Google has also been pushing the idea that search and shopping are moving from keyword queries to AI-mediated experiences.
In May 2024, Google said AI Overviews would roll out broadly in the U.S. and expand to more countries, describing the feature as reducing “legwork” in search.
In January 2026, Google announced what it called an open standard for “agentic commerce” aimed at helping retailers connect to AI-driven shopping journeys.
What this implies for vendor concentration and governance
By design, Unilever is consolidating core data, AI tooling and parts of its application estate under one hyperscaler, with Vertex AI and Gemini named as key components.
While this integrated structure aims to reduce complexity, it also aligns with what Gartner describes as a growing ‘cloud concentration’ risk, where reliance on a single provider’s roadmap can create systemic disruption.
NIST has also highlighted portability and interoperability as recurring concerns in cloud standards work, which is where lock-in and switching friction often surface in practice.