As one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, Unilever is known for its quality brands including Dove, TRESemmé, Omo, Degree, Hellmann’s, and Ben & Jerry’s. Whether it be cleaning, beauty, or other consumer products, each area requires the latest scientific breakthroughs to improve products that over 3.4 billion people use daily. Unilever is harnessing the power of Microsoft Azure Quantum Elements, a computer system purpose-built to accelerate scientific discovery, to help drive innovation.
“If you had a million possible solutions to your problem, how would you figure out where to start?” That is the question Alberto Prado, Global Head of R&D Digital & Partnerships at Unilever began to contend with.
Over the past two and a half years, Unilever has partnered with Microsoft to identify new digital capabilities to drive product innovation forward. Unilever is bringing its digital vision to life through the transformational DataLab—its digital counterpart to the company’s physical laboratories—with the help of Microsoft Azure. From unlocking the secrets of our skin’s microbiome to reducing the carbon footprint of a multibillion-dollar business, Unilever is redefining what it means to be a consumer goods company in the modern world with leading science.
Accelerating scientific discovery
With Copilot in Azure, Azure high-performance computing, and the advanced simulation capabilities of Azure Quantum Elements, Unilever can query scientific information using natural language, performing thousands of computational simulations in the time it would take to run tens of laboratory experiments. Unilever scientists can use the data gathered from these simulations to fine-tune models that screen tens of thousands of materials or enable the exploration of intricate chemical reactions at substantial speed. “This sort of discovery and exploration would have been unprecedented in our previous way of working in terms of time, resources, and patience,” says Mike Dale, Digital R&D Director at Unilever.
“This sort of discovery and exploration would have been unprecedented in our previous way of working in terms of time, resources, and patience.”
Mike Dale, Digital R&D Director, Unilever
Unilever research and development teams can now expand their search space for novel molecules that restore natural bonds in hair fibers across more hair types, in turn redefining the standards of personalized hair care for brands like Dove and TRESemmé. Furthermore, by placing scaled simulations at the forefront of the discovery funnel, Unilever will be further empowered to expedite the delivery of solutions within their key sustainability focus areas.
Unilever has been on a transformative journey that includes one of the largest cloud migrations in the consumer goods industry. Now, with Azure Quantum Elements, Unilever is unlocking new possibilities. “We are amplifying the creativity and the discovery power of our researchers in finding new solutions to problems in science and technology that we could have only dreamt of in the past,” says Prado. With Unilever’s vast repository of proprietary data and a century of scientific expertise in personal and household care, the consumer goods leader is capitalizing on this technological leap with Microsoft. “We are no longer preparing for the future; we are in the future now, and that is really exciting,” concludes Prado.
“We are no longer preparing for the future; we are in the future now, and that is really exciting.”
Alberto Prado, Global Head of R&D Digital & Partnerships, Unilever
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