These days, fashion and beauty companies don’t just act like technology companies – running internal incubators, continuous integrations and experimental skunkworks labs – but restructuring the very core of their activities around innovation like artificial intelligence.
Take The Estée Lauder Cos.
On Thursday, OpenAI, the tech company known for sparking the current artificial intelligence boom, announced its partnership with the beauty giant to unleash AI across its portfolio. This includes household names like Estee LauderClinique, La Mer, Bobbie Brown and Aveda.
According to an OpenAI spokesperson, Estée Lauder will “deploy GPTs across all of its brands.” GPTs are at the very heart of generative AI work, featuring large language models capable of understanding and generating content.
The beauty company is no stranger to technology platforms, having included the augmented reality trial for its most recent launch on Amazon. But its work with ChatGPT, particularly the ChatGPT Enterprise Group, provides faster access to its own data vault and the ripples are expected to ripple across the entire company. This effort led to the development of 240 custom GPTs that directly shape – and accelerate – how the company creates and brings new products to market.
The move represents a new chapter for the 78-year-old beauty company, but the beginnings of that story date back more than a year.
Estée Lauder was not available for comment, but according to an OpenAI blog post published Thursday, the momentum started when ChatGPT exploded onto the scene, near the end of 2022.
“When OpenAI launched ChatGPT, we asked employees to tell us how they would use it,” Raheel Khan, senior vice president of foresight and growth intelligence at The Estée Lauder Cos., was quoted as saying. “More than 1,000 people submitted ideas.”
This energy led to the creation of the ELC GPT Lab in April 2024. The team’s mission was to design, build, launch and scale GPTs across a wide range of scenarios, from how employees work to ‘to the way they develop new products.
“Our work together is a perfect example of how employees drive AI innovation from the ground up and ELC leaders accelerate their progress and learning along the way,” said James Dyett, head of platform sales at OpenAI, told WWD.
Months later, it is clear that this work is not a random experiment or a hobby, but a technology an overhaul poised to reshape the very fundamentals of Estée Lauder’s business. On a broader level, it also aptly illustrates the changing technology landscape of traditional fashion and beauty businesses.
Just a few years ago, a thorny dilemma faced decades-old brands and department stores. Even though they had a rich goldmine of customer data, sometimes worth several generations, they could hardly profit from it. The AI of the time required clear data nomenclature and classification. These files, however, were generally disordered, collected in various ways, and scattered across different divisions.
Today, the next generation of AI can make sense of chaos and finally harness information.
This is great news for companies like Estée Lauder, which draws on more than 75 years of data from clinical trials, product use, surveys and more, spanning more than 20 brands.
“Before, we spent hours manually cleaning and organizing data to uncover insights,” Yuan Zhan, director of ELC’s Fragrance Foresight team, said on the blog. “With Fragrance GPT, we can ask complex questions in plain English and the data is instantly analyzed. »
GPT Fragrance Insights analyzes consumer surveys and large data sets to identify trends or preferences that are crucial to new product design.
Clinical trial GPT can sift through a wealth of data and extract information about the effectiveness of skin care products.
An example cited Thursday in an OpenAI blog post describes the latter GPT as being able to “determine the percentage of immediate improvement in hydration of a product like Estée Lauder’s Advanced Night Repair serum – from thousands of clinical trial reports with a simple query. »
Other GPTs help ease the burden on sales teams. Copywriting GPT acts as a personalized copywriting assistant for campaigns across platforms, while a Vendor Snapshot Creator GPT finds and gathers essential vendor details, such as their profile and purchasing history.
Across R&D and sales teams, ChatGPT improved response times by over 90% and reduced tasks from hours to minutes. These new efficiencies accelerate the time and effort needed to launch new products. This gives a large company with a legion of brands the one thing that might have eluded it in the past: the ability to act as nimbly as a startup to adapt to trends and cultural moments.
Today, it seems that more and more employees are clamoring for the use of AI. With the evolving relationship between OpenAI and Estée Lauder, the genius of AI has been uncorked.