Colgate: Harnessing AI for innovative oral care: how Colgate-Palmolive is taking on the charge

Artificial intelligence is all over the news, and seems to be pervading everything. Our dental and periodontal professions must surely be looking at how it will affect oral health.

In this series of interviews, the European Federation of Periodontology is exploring what our partners are doing, or perhaps NOT doing with AI.

In this interview, we talk to Kli Pappas, the Senior Director of Predictive Analytics and Head of AI for Colgate-Palmolive.

Kli clarifies upfront: There is “traditional AI, and then there is “generative” AI! Traditional AI has been used quite extensively already, for making the supply chain more efficient, identifying lead ingredient combinations for toothpaste etc., but generative AI is newer and more exciting. “It's trained on the entire web, which means in as much as the internet encapsulates all human knowledge, a large language model trained on the whole of it is the most complex object built in human history.”

There is a big BUT though! “There's a concept called the jagged frontier, popularised by Professor Ethan Mollick of the University of Pennsylvania, which is basically that these models are unexpectedly good in some areas and then unexpectedly bad in other areas.  That ends up having huge implications for how we can implement generative AI.” 

So how can Colgate use this new tool responsibly? For Kli Pappas it’s about accountability.  “We were one of the first companies to update our employee Code of Conduct, which can be consulted on-line. This is updated with responsible AI principles.”

He adds: “We assign accountability. There is always an accountable person. No one can blame AI So that is one of our responsible AI principles clearly articulated in the Code of Conduct. The other ones are around fairness, integrity, human centricity and security.”

What practical applications is Colgate using AI for? Productivity is one area. For Kli Pappas this does not mean cutting staff. “Companies talk a lot about productivity in the context of the output divided by the input. If you want to get productivity gains from AI there are two ways to do this, keep your output the same, and cut your input, the other way is to empower your workforce by giving them tools to be more productive and more efficient. That is a strategic decision from the company, also embedded into our Code of Conduct - to use AI to prioritise augmenting human capabilities.”

This takes Kli Pappas to another use of generative AI which is about tasks.  AI can crunch data very quickly and effectively, taking away some of the boring and painstaking work. Kli Pappas makes it very clear that there are limits. “Outside of some very isolated areas there are not very many jobs for which all the tasks can be replaced by an AI system.” At Colgate there are none. “There are no jobs in our company where all tasks can be done by AI.”

Another space to leverage generative AI for Colgate is innovation. “We start with a synthesis of consumer insights, and we actually develop those products, to respond to people’s needs. “One of the places where we leverage AI currently is by using models that can map search engine results, and actually look at what questions people are asking about oral health. This is a really interesting place to go because people are very honest when they search on-line. We have algorithms that look at the types of things that people are searching for, and then synthesise that down to the key pain points or needs that people have.”

From that insight into consumer behaviour, Colgate looks at what products to develop, and how they are marketed. “We're talking about products in a way that people care about. We're also delivering a therapeutic benefit. We have this system in place that marketing and innovation teams use around the world that actually lets them look at what people are talking about their oral health or the concerns that they have. And then that is used at the earliest stage of the innovation funnel to develop products that are meaningful and address people’s needs”.

What about social responsibility? How is Colgate using AI to ensure affordability and accessibility to oral care? “One of the active uses for generative AI right now is within our plants, in Africa and Eurasia. They're loading instrument manuals into a generative AI system. If a machine breaks in the middle of the night, and staff go in they say, I'm seeing this error code, or this is what's happening, our AI searches through a 500 page technical manual and will tell the plant operator where to intervene, to fix the issue more quickly than they otherwise would have been able to do. The more we use AI to increase the efficiency of our plants, the more we can sell products that are more affordable. And Colgate does that extremely well. And that's all enabled by machine learning, traditional AI, which we've been using for a long time. And now generative AI is really making that much more capable.”

Colgate's journey with AI signifies a forward step towards a future where technology and humanity progress hand in hand, delivering tangible benefits and ultimately contributing to better oral health for all.