Dive Brief:
- Colgate-Palmolive plans to pursue agentic AI adoption as part of its 2030 growth strategy, according to the company’s Q3 2025 financial report Friday.
- After scaling digital, data and analytics capabilities, the company plans to accelerate investments and efforts in revenue growth management and agentic AI, said Noel Wallace, chairman, CEO and president, speaking during the earnings call.
- Wallace said AI agents represent Colgate-Palmolive’s “next big frontier... that we’re quite excited about.” The company anticipates using the technology to enhance its commerce strategy, drive growth and inform demand planning.
Dive Insight:
Colgate-Palmolive’s agentic AI focus comes as the company looks to improve profitability in a challenging environment. Consumer-oriented businesses are battling headwinds from economic uncertainty, tariffs and rising costs.
The company lowered its expectations for organic sales growth for the year, but grew its net and organic sales year over year in Q3.
“Rest assured, AI is right at the center in terms of our strategic growth enablers for the 2030 strategy,” Wallace said Friday. “The investments that we put in place over the last couple of years position us very well to continue to maximize on the trends that we're seeing with that exciting technology.”
Enterprises continue to assess how agentic AI can fit into strategies and workflows. Some are making more progress than others.
More than 2 in 5 companies were actively deploying AI agents in Q3, up from 11% in Q1, according to KPMG’s quarterly survey released in September. Still, the majority of businesses are in pilot or exploratory phases.
CIOs and business leaders have plenty of implementation concerns, from data privacy to interoperability. Roadblocks are also abundant, with many companies needing to strengthen data foundations or modernize other aspects of the tech stack that would underpin agentic initiatives.
The potential benefits of AI agents, however, keep enterprise decision-makers motivated to make progress toward adoption.
Retailers, including Williams-Sonoma, Ralph Lauren and Walmart, are embracing agentic AI for improved customer experiences, among other use cases. Food and beverage giant PepsiCo and hospitality company Wyndham are also early adopters of the technology.
