Unilever’s NOVA agents process 95% of orders in the pilot markets without a person touching them, and refund claims move twice as fast.
Nestlé is putting SAP’s AI agents on collections, and the average company now automates 73% of receivables work, according to PYMNTS Intelligence.
Unilever has eight agents live worldwide and plans to take NOVA from 11 pilot markets to more than 50, with North America next.
About 2 million of Unilever’s roughly 20 million annual orders still arrive as emails, PDFs, spreadsheets and photos of paper forms, and each one used to take a person 15 to 20 minutes to key in. A system of five AI agents called NOVA now handles that first step of the order-to-cash process in about 90 seconds across 11 pilot markets, Francis Castro, Unilever’s head of technology for customer operations, said in a Microsoft case study.
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The consumer goods company behind Dove and Vaseline serves about 300,000 direct customers, from supermarket chains to local distributors. In the pilot markets, 95% of orders now pass through without manual work, refund claims are settled twice as fast and new customer onboarding takes 90% less time, Castro said.
NOVA splits the job among five agents built on Microsoft Foundry. Four read an incoming email, work out its context and pull out the order, and a fifth checks the result before the agents enter the order into Unilever’s SAP system, Graham Sommer , Unilever’s head of customer operations, said in a Consumer Goods Technology interview.
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