Unilever Announces 5-Year Strategic Partnership with Google Cloud — Ushering in a New Era of Agentic Commerce for the CPG Industry

Unilever Officially Announces Major Partnership with Google Cloud

On February 17, 2026, global consumer goods giant Unilever announced it had signed a 5-year strategic partnership with Google Cloud. Unilever, which owns iconic brands such as Dove, Vaseline, and Hellmann's, will leverage Google Cloud's Vertex AI and Gemini models to advance brand discovery, marketing measurement, and "agentic commerce" -- a new shopping paradigm driven by AI agents.

Willem Uijen, Unilever's Chief Supply Chain and Operations Officer, stated that "technology has moved to the heart of value creation at Unilever" and emphasized that "as brands are increasingly discovered and chosen in environments shaped by AI, we must lead this shift."

Industry Landscape

This partnership represents a significant pivot in Unilever's cloud strategy. In 2023, Unilever worked with Accenture and Microsoft to complete a large-scale cloud migration, moving over 1,700 servers and 380 mission-critical business applications to Microsoft Azure. At the time, Azure served as the backbone of Unilever's cloud infrastructure.

However, according to Computer Weekly, Alex Rutter, Google Cloud's Managing Director for AI in EMEA, stated explicitly that "Google Cloud will become the consolidated cloud and data platform for Unilever." While Unilever will continue to use Microsoft 365 and Copilot for productivity tools, its AI-driven data infrastructure will migrate to Google Cloud.

Meanwhile, interest in "agentic commerce" is surging across the CPG industry. A McKinsey report predicts that AI agent-driven commerce could reach $1 trillion in the US retail market by 2030. Google Cloud itself introduced the concept of the "invisible shelf" in a blog post published in January 2026, describing how AI agents search, compare, and purchase products.

The Three Pillars of the Partnership

The partnership is structured around three core pillars.

Leveraging Vertex AI and Gemini, this pillar aims to build "next-generation marketing" capabilities spanning brand discovery, conversion, and measurement. As consumer purchasing behavior shifts toward conversational and agentic models, this initiative seeks to fundamentally redesign how CPG brands are discovered and selected.

Unilever's core applications and data platforms will migrate to Google Cloud, creating a unified environment that enables scalable AI deployment across the entire value chain. Google Cloud's Rutter stated that this will allow "data to be converted into actionable insights more rapidly."

Combining Unilever's industry expertise with Google's AI technologies, this pillar focuses on developing intelligent systems called "agentic workflows." These are AI systems capable of autonomously executing complex business processes, using a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) approach to generate business-relevant insights from Unilever's proprietary data.

Tara Brady, Google Cloud's EMEA President, announced that this goes "beyond modernizing legacy systems to deploying advanced models like Gemini to build intelligent systems that reason, learn, and act."

Impact and Implications for E-Commerce Businesses

This partnership signals that one of the world's largest CPG companies -- with revenues of EUR 50.5 billion and 3.7 billion users -- is making a full-scale investment in "agentic commerce." For e-commerce businesses, there are several practical implications.

Google Cloud's "invisible shelf" blog recommends "treating product data as your new packaging." Structuring data so that AI agents can search and evaluate attributes like sustainable materials and allergen information will determine future product visibility.

In an era where AI agents search for products on behalf of consumers, traditional SEO alone is no longer sufficient. Businesses must adapt to "GEO" (Generative Engine Optimization) -- optimizing content in formats that AI can understand and recommend.

Lydia Leong, VP at Gartner, told Computer Weekly that "approximately 80% of midsize and large enterprises use multiple public clouds, and this trend has remained largely unchanged over the past five years." Purpose-driven "functional segmentation" of cloud services is becoming the mainstream approach.

Conclusion

Unilever's decision symbolizes an irreversible shift toward an "AI-first" approach in the CPG industry. As the reality of consumers discovering and purchasing products through AI agents draws closer, the significance of one of the world's largest CPG companies partnering with Google Cloud to drive agentic commerce cannot be overstated.

The key point to watch for e-commerce businesses is what specific "agentic workflows" Unilever and Google Cloud will implement. If Google's proposed "Consumer-to-Merchant" and "Merchant-to-Merchant" agent-to-agent transactions become practical, the way products are discovered, recommended, and purchased will fundamentally change. Keep a close eye on the concrete use cases expected to be revealed in the coming months.