L’Oréal is redesigning the way it markets beauty products as artificial intelligence takes a larger role in the consumer journey.
Asmita Dubey, L’Oréal Group’s chief digital and marketing officer, says the shift is not just about making ads faster or cheaper. It is about understanding the systems that connect consumers and brands as AI begins to mediate more of the search and discovery process.
At L’Oréal, that has pushed marketing, data, and IT teams closer together. Dubey said the company now puts those teams in the same room to ask whether its marketing engine is ready for today and for tomorrow.
The company’s AI strategy has three pillars: helping employees work with AI, embedding AI across business functions such as marketing, research, and operations, and understanding how AI is changing the consumer journey.
Dubey said the consumer journey is not shrinking. In her view, it is expanding as people spend more time chatting with AI. She said a search that once took a few minutes can now take 11 minutes, raising new questions about content and credibility.
That shift changes the competition. In traditional search, brands fight to appear near the top of a list. In an AI-mediated journey, Dubey said a brand must be relevant and credible enough to become part of the answer.
L’Oréal has been testing advertising in Google’s AI Overviews and working with OpenAI, Amazon, and Alibaba as it explores how its products can be found through AI search. The company says more than a billion consumers are on AI platforms and asking questions about beauty, travel, birthdays, and parties.
Dubey said almost 20% of L’Oréal’s marketing investments are now AI-led, and ROI measurement already relies heavily on machine learning and AI. She described the result as a 'dual muscle of creativity and technology.'
The company is also using AI deeper in the business. It has brought beauty research into an internal intelligence platform that lets employees interrogate a large body of existing research conversationally. Product development and formulation are becoming more data-driven, while image, text, and video creation are changing as generative AI tools expand.
Dubey also said marketers need to understand the 'architecture' behind the system. Without that, she warned, things can go wrong in an environment where the company works with hundreds of agencies and a growing stack of software and platforms.
For investors and operators, the message is straightforward: AI is no longer a side tool in marketing. It is becoming part of the machinery itself.
Capital rewards clear rules, and the market has already voted on that reality. When consumer discovery moves into AI systems, brands that understand the pipes and plumbing will have an edge. Those that do not will pay for it in wasted spend, weaker visibility, and lower returns on the taxpayer's broader economy of private capital.
