Chic meets geek as L’Oréal partners with Nvidia to scale AI across beauty operations

L’Oréal has announced a major partnership with Nvidia to supercharge its generative AI capabilities across its business operations, joining Nvidia’s AI Enterprise microservices ecosystem. This collaboration positions the world’s largest cosmetics company to leverage AI for everything from 3D product visualizations to personalized marketing, potentially reshaping how beauty brands design, market, and sell their products.

What you should know: L’Oréal’s partnership with Nvidia will scale its CreAItech Generative AI platform, which creates visualizations and assets from product models to reduce creative team workload.

• The collaboration enables automated design and rendering of images and 3D models for marketing and research purposes, allowing teams to quickly test and iterate different marketing strategies.
• Images can be personalized for individual customers or localized for different markets, addressing the resource-intensive challenge of adapting products for global audiences.
• The partnership includes developing an AI development tool called the AI Refinery to power experiences behind Noli, L’Oréal’s AI-powered beauty marketplace.

Key innovations: L’Oréal has already deployed several AI-powered tools that demonstrate the technology’s potential in beauty retail.

• Beauty Genius serves as a generative AI-powered personal beauty assistant, offering 24/7 personalized guidance based on L’Oréal’s proprietary knowledge and dermatological data.
• The tool uses generative AI, augmented reality, and computer vision to recommend routines and help users discover products tailored to their skin tone, hair type, and beauty concerns.
• A foundation model in development aims to reduce material and energy waste during the product formulation process.

Competitive landscape: Other major beauty brands are rapidly adopting generative AI for marketing and customer engagement.

• Estée Lauder partnered with Adobe to reduce digital marketing campaign creation time using Adobe’s Firefly generative AI platform and created a Voice-Enabled Makeup Assistant for visually impaired users.
• Unilever developed “ultra-personalized experiences” including a virtual scalp therapist for its Dove brand that provides expert skincare advice.
• AI-native startups like Revieve offer AI-powered skincare and makeup tools over Google Cloud, enabling smaller players to compete with AI services.

The big picture: Generative AI adoption in beauty reflects broader marketing trends, with 76% of marketers now using the technology for basic content creation and 63% for analyzing marketing data, according to Salesforce research.

• Current applications focus on marketing and customer-facing functions, but the technology is expected to expand into product design and testing as companies gain confidence in their AI strategies.
• As-a-service AI tools are democratizing access to advanced capabilities, meaning the next major disruptive force in cosmetics could come from unexpected players rather than established giants.