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In a January 2025 interview, Kimberly-Clark’s Zack Hicks described an approach to innovation built around business priorities, reusable technology, employee skills and bounded experiments. His examples range from AI tools for procurement and manufacturing to consumer analytics. The interview offers a view of the company’s strategy at that time—not an independent verification of its reported results or a statement of its current organization.
Innovation starts with business needs, not technology for its own sake
Hicks, identified in the interview as Kimberly-Clark’s chief digital and technology officer, said the company was moving its Digital Technology Solutions (DTS) organization toward a product-and-platform model. The goal was to build capabilities that could scale across the business rather than repeatedly solve similar problems in separate places.
He described Kimberly-Clark as operating in more than 50 countries, with IT leaders in business offices and plants and technology centers in several regions. At the time of the interview, Hicks said DTS had roughly 1,400 direct team members working globally. About 200 central-team members had been realigned toward business functions, most of them data and insights professionals. These are interview-era figures, not current headcount claims.
Hicks said the company was modernizing supply-chain capabilities, considering how they might extend to commercial partners, and using consumer data to improve digital sales and marketing. He framed transformation as a sequence of value-producing steps informed by business feedback: “With digital transformation, it’s important to deliver value incrementally.” He added, “Big bets often don’t pay off, and getting real-time feedback from the business keeps you focused on the right areas.”
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AI examples span procurement, factories, R&D and retail
Hicks’s examples describe AI and analytics applied to specific operating and commercial questions, rather than a single company-wide AI product. In the interview, he also said a global data lake and self-service capabilities supported more advanced AI and early machine-learning work.
| Area | Example Hicks described | What the interview establishes |
|---|---|---|
| Procurement | AI applied to procurement data so employees could ask questions about vendor spending and product expenditures across languages. | Hicks said it helped remove several million dollars’ worth of other tools. The interview provides no financial breakdown or calculation method. |
| Manufacturing | Violet, an AI tool built from captured process knowledge. | Hicks said line employees could ask questions in any language about operations and quality improvement. |
| Research and development | Dora, a tool for consolidating R&D data. | The interview does not detail its users, deployment scale or measured effect. |
| Retail analytics | Real-time shelf analytics related to price sensitivity, elasticity and price-pack architecture. | Hicks said the work improved sales, but gave no numerical result or method. |
| Consumer engagement | AI used to predict when a customer might enter the diaper market. | Hicks reported “a 60x higher performance in our engagement.” The interview does not define the metric or baseline; this is not evidence of a 60-fold sales increase. |
Hicks also said Kimberly-Clark had about 80 later-stage innovations underway at the time of the interview. The interview does not give a breakdown of those projects or their outcomes.
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Building skills and making room for local context
Hicks described an in-house Digital University intended to build technical skills across the workforce, along with mentoring and real-time feedback. He cast his leadership responsibility in practical terms: “I’ve always believed that the most important thing I can do in my role is remove the obstacles in front of the team.”
That people focus sits alongside the platform strategy. Reusable systems may help a global organization scale, but Hicks’s examples also point to the need for business teams and local operations to shape how technology is applied. The interview describes an organization spanning multiple countries and sites; it does not suggest that identical execution will suit every market.
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Experiments have limits—and a decision point
Hicks described giving teams small “walled gardens” in which to test ideas, while limiting the time or money available and setting a point when leaders decide whether to continue. That structure creates room to learn without treating every experiment as a permanent program.
He cited a hackathon at Kimberly-Clark’s global technology hub in India. According to Hicks, it drew 130 entries, produced seven finalists and led to funding for the top three. He said the format surfaced people and ideas beyond functions traditionally associated with marketing and sales. The interview does not provide the funded projects’ later results.
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Other examples of trend-spotting included taking company leaders to Silicon Valley to meet technology and industry startups, as well as conversations with suppliers and industry groups. Hicks presented these as ways to encounter emerging ideas, not as guarantees that a trend will become a successful company initiative.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to assess the approach
The interview’s account suggests four useful tests for an innovation program: whether it addresses a business need, whether the solution can scale without ignoring local requirements, whether employees can use it effectively, and whether leaders have evidence to justify continuing an experiment. The examples illustrate Hicks’s stated approach, but the interview does not independently validate the company’s reported outcomes or provide enough methodology to compare projects quantitatively.
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Quick Recap
Read the CIO interview with Zack Hicks.
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