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AI and analytics are changing the way businesses operate. We spoke to Steve McCrystal, Chief Enterprise Technology Officer, to understand how we’re using world-class technology to boost efficiency and ensure our operational infrastructure is resilient.
Unilever is one of the biggest companies in the world. With a complex technology estate, optimising our processes to keep pace with shifting markets is no easy task. It would be impossible for any one person to have complete oversight of an organisation of this size, so a large part of my team’s purpose is building links across the business, making it more effective and efficient.
To give an indication of the scale of our remit, we oversee 1,500 applications that support our strategic technology capabilities. Our enterprise data platform contains 8 petabytes of data, fuelled by 25,000 data pipelines collecting and processing new data each day. And finally, our network handles on average 240 terabytes of data a week for over 3 billion transactions, keeping our IT systems up and running 99.995% of the time, 365 days a year.
One of our primary challenges is to consistently keep everything running smoothly across various functions and markets. Because of our size, resilience and security of our systems are our primary objective. By being alert and smart with our technology choices, we are working towards a future where we are cyber safe by design.
To be an organisation that truly wins, you need both your people and your processes to be at their best. With that in mind, there are two ways to understand operational excellence. First, how we create systems that allow us to become more efficient in terms of productivity and performance, and secondly, how we support our people and create an efficient working environment.
For example, by the end of 2024, we trained 23,000 employees in AI usage. Our focused use of AI and digital capabilities to enhance decision-making is helping us drive excellence throughout the business. Supporting the automation and standardisation of processes is a large part of this, helping to free up Unilever employees to focus on growing our brands.
We’re constantly searching for new opportunities to streamline the business, and in the past few years, we have made some bold decisions that have set us apart from our competitors. Our team introduced an industry-first Integrated Operations (iOps) programme, which aims to enhance our end-to-end customer value chain by leveraging advanced analytics, technology and data-driven decision-making. Making our systems faster and more resilient will be key to ensuring our growth and cost-effectiveness as a business.
Our move to being 100% cloud-based has also helped create agility in how we enable AI across our tech and data platforms. AI has been part of our ecosystem for more than a decade. To date, we have implemented more than 500 AI-based capabilities across the globe. More recently, we’ve been using AI to help transform our supply chains, achieving significant cost savings in the process. We’re using AI to help seamlessly connect consumer demand, product development, planning, suppliers, logistics and manufacturing.
In Toronto, Canada, we have established one of the first AI-focused research hubs in the industry. It is harnessing the power of Unilever’s research ecosystem to explore and develop cutting-edge AI applications that will drive our next wave of productivity and further accelerate business growth.
We’re also incredibly proud of our Responsible AI framework, which governs how we develop, deploy and use AI. It’s been a critical part of shaping Unilever’s AI strategy, helping us to manage risks and to strategically focus the way that we use it. With technology evolving at an unprecedented rate, it’s vital that our operations team continues to deliver solutions that help our business to keep pace with it.
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