Artificial Intelligence in Practice

14Kimberly-Clark: Using AI To Make Sense Of Customer Data

Kimberly-Clark produces some of the world's best-known personal care brands, including Huggies, Kleenex and Scott, which are sold in 175 countries. In fact, one in four of the world's population uses its products on a regular basis.¹

While its products may not be the most glamorous, they are an essential part of day-to-day life, meaning huge amounts of resources are spent to ensure they are effectively produced, sold and distributed.

This means, like many other large businesses, Kimberly-Clark has found that the most productive way forward has been to essentially become a technology company. As well as producing the everyday goods it has built its name on, it licenses over 150 of its self-built technologies to other businesses, ranging from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies.²

What Problems Is Artificial Intelligence Helping To Solve?

In Kimberly-Clark's market, businesses need to build intimate understandings of their customers’ lives to understand how they interact with their products.

This means understanding how life-changing events like pregnancy and weddings will affect their buying habits and patterns.

To do this, they have to make as much sense as they can out of the explosion of data customers leave behind as they browse their product websites and social channels or make purchases in stores. Even with computers this was a monumental challenge, before artificially intelligent software solutions started to ...