Unilever is investing heavily into the use of AI to better market its portfolio of brands, and it recently picked Toronto as a hub for its experiments.
This story was originally published in the 2024 Winter issue of strategy magazine
As the marketing industry looks into how AI can be applied across their organizations, Unilever signaled to the world that it’s investing heavily in the tech – right in our own backyard. Late last year the CPG giant opened up a global AI facility, called Horizon3 Labs, choosing Toronto for its headquarters.
Horizon3 Labs’ focus is to find ways to increase productivity using AI tools and tech. It intends to do this by generating new concepts, designs and projects that can be scaled and used across the global business.
“Unilever has identified 15 focus areas aligned to our business priorities. Horizon3 Labs will initially focus on the three that have the greatest potential for making an immediate impact: forecasting, modelling complex data relationships with graph technology, and generating insights on trends, patterns and predictions through [generative AI],” says Gary Bogdani, head of data science for Unilever North America, and head of data and analytics for Unilever Canada.
Toronto was chosen for the lab due to its access to a growing network of academia, start-ups and businesses dedicated to AI, says Bogdani. Unilever already reports using more than 400 applications of AI across disciplines including marketing and customer service, as well as advanced analytics and machine learning in supply chain and logistics.
The company has demonstrated a couple uses of AI in marketing, such as creating an engine for Hellmann’s recipe website, which provides more relevant results, drawing from users’ individual tastes using fewer searches. Unilever has also developed an AI tool to auto-update product titles and descriptions on retail websites.
Unilever’s investment comes as the marketing and advertising industries explore how AI can be used to make work more efficient. Jason Brommet, Microsoft general manager of modern work and surface for the U.S., Canada and Latin America, says AI can be used by agencies, for example, to cut down the hours otherwise needed to format and design creative pitches.
He also imagines AI being used to more effectively utilize the institutional memory of long-running shops. “Agencies have years and years of data and customer intelligence and customer insight. But being able to mine all of that data is often hard,” Brommet says. “If you think about this environment where you can curate all of those insights and all of that intelligence so that you’re able to respond to customers faster, and you’re able to build pitches faster, you’re able to identify patterns, buyer behaviour, buyer research and all of those capabilities.”
Brommet says there is opportunity for industries to make real strides at improving productivity amid a sea of technical advancements and new apps that can be difficult to keep up with.
“We as humans are drowning under technical depth,” he says. “We’ve got more apps, we’ve got more data, we’ve got more communications that we just can’t physically process as humans, and it ultimately impacts innovation. How do we actually improve Canada’s productivity and innovation on a global scale? To me, AI is one of those profound transformational technologies that’s going to enable us to go do it.”
