Colgate Palmolive's Prioritises AI, Premiumisation And Oral & Personal Care Growth: CEO Prabha Narasimhan

Colgate-Palmolive's CEO, Prabha Narasimhan has emphasised the company's strong confidence in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML). She highlighted that AI technology is being extensively utilized within their supply chain operations.

"A lot of the stuff that was human visually enabled has now become camera visually enabled. And we have digital twins running in our plants that allow us to predict before something goes wrong, and also to take a look at what's happening to speeds and what's happening to efficiency and just run altogether a significantly tighter ship in terms of output as well as energy consumption," Narasimhan said during company's recent earning call.

Narasimhan outlined four key strategic pillars driving the company’s vision. The first focuses on expanding the oral care category, the second emphasises premiumisation, the third targets leadership in toothbrushes and devices, and the fourth aims to diversify the personal care segment.

In its recently announced Q2 FY2025 results, the FMCG giant reported a 16.17 per cent rise in net profit, reaching RS 395.05 crore.

The company’s advertising expenditure grew by 17.8 per cent in Q2 year-over-year, reflecting heightened investment in both brand promotion and category development initiatives.

Colgate-Palmolive's Chief Financial Officer MS Jacob said, "Advertising, we've seen this increase as we continue to fund programs like our consumption building program, the oral health movement, and we will continue to invest behind the innovations that we are bringing to the market".

Jacob emphasised that the quality and scale of advertising are crucial for driving the company’s topline growth.

The oral health company has also ramped up its promotional spending.

According to Jacob, "We are deploying a lot of tools to collect data from the 1.7 million, distributors the stores we cover and also from direct trade, e-commerce, etc to make sure we are spending in the right places at the right level and we are getting the right returns".