Colgate-Palmolive Readies Organization for Agentic Future
Colgate-Palmolive is progressing on its global digital transformation, investing in and scaling capabilities within areas such as innovation, data, analytics and artificial intelligence, according to CEO and president Noel Wallace.
During the company's recent earnings conversation, Wallace shared details about Colgate-Palmolive's data and AI ambitions, which it has steadily invested in, particularly over the past three years.
"We launched an internal AI hub and a lot of AI models to ensure our people can access it securely, first and foremost, but more importantly, build confidence with their own AI capabilities," said Wallace.
These efforts have required data infrastructure work. Colgate-Palmolive first built data products that could be used across its analytics teams, and it is now layering agents on top of them.
"We've invested quite aggressively over the last couple of years to ensure that we can enable all of our data to move agentically quickly," said Wallace. "... as you integrate that into your organization's way of working, you get people to use agentic tools to mine that data and hopefully have conversations to optimize how we want to execute against some of the learnings."
The company has also redesigned some of its manual processes, embedding agents to remove some of the complexity from its operations and expedite results.
How AI Is Overhauling Operations
Certain use cases are still in the early stages. When it comes to agentic commerce, for example, Wallace said the company has had some discussions around it, but it's not yet a significant part of the business.
"We're obviously staying very close to it. We'll manage that, but we want to ensure that we're at least appearing in GEO searches," he said.
Colgate-Palmolive has also been incorporating AI and discovery in its marketing and research and development practices, focusing particularly on omni-demand generation.
Also: How Colgate-Palmolive uses AI to globalize product success
"AI will be pivotal in transforming all of our marketing processes in that regard with content creation and factories so that we can generate content in one part of the world and immediately utilize it in other parts of the world," said Wallace.
And as the advertising and media markets continue to shift, Colgate-Palmolive has been able to better measure the effectiveness of that spend as part of its investments in AI and data.
Obtaining Employee Trust and Buy-In
These initiatives require enterprise-wide buy-in and built-in education programs.
The company has already trained and upskilled a significant part of its workforce. Wallace said they are about 70% done with advanced artificial intelligence training at the vice president level.
The organization is asking its employees to use large language models across their work to drive enhanced productivity, and it is being used "pretty consistently across the board," he said. Just prior to the earnings announcement, the company's entire senior team participated in a vibe coding experiment.
"We've obviously moved from [AI] pilots into scale as we speak. And I think over time, we'll start to hopefully leverage some of the learnings that we're getting and some of the benefits that we're seeing from productivity and ultimately drive top line growth and bottom line growth for the company," said Wallace.
