L’Oréal has a new OpenAI partnership aimed at two things marketers now pretend are separate: product discovery and content production. The deal plugs OpenAI’s models into L’Oréal’s in-house generative system, CreAItech, and lets the company provide up-to-date product information to the models behind ChatGPT. OpenAI leadership has been keen to say this does not mean putting a thumb on the scale; it means answers about L’Oréal products can draw from brand-supplied notes, not just the usual cocktail of reviews, Reddit posts and wiki entries. Maybelline is also set to integrate its virtual try-on app directly into ChatGPT, a neat compression of the funnel: prompt, product, makeover.
CreAItech is L’Oréal’s internal engine for cranking out stills and video across earned, owned and paid social, plus e-commerce — basically anywhere that demands infinite versions of the same idea. Built in 2024 and rolled out “in earnest” last year, it already mixes tools from Seedance, Google’s Gemini, Veo3 and Imagen, Adobe and Stable Diffusion. The OpenAI addition is partly about stronger text-to-image rendering, said chief digital and marketing officer Asmita Dubey. On a recent full-year earnings call, CEO Nicolas Hieronimus said CreAItech reduced production costs by 40% and helped staff create 50,000 marketing assets — numbers that land differently depending on whether you’re paid to produce assets or approve them.
The OpenAI partnership also sits inside a broader scramble to stay visible as consumers outsource searching to AI. Gartner’s Greg Carlucci said personal care brands are already seeing declines in website traffic as people shift to AI-led search experiences, and that “nearly one in five consumers” now use generative AI tools to find information. L’Oréal is already spending paid media on ChatGPT: Dubey said it has been running ads there since April and testing whether people click to buy with CeraVe, SkinCeuticals and Garnier in the U.S. She offered no results. “It’s early days.”
Measurement remains more aspiration than machinery. L’Oréal’s BETiQ tool and a CreativeX partnership are meant to connect AI-made creative with media decisions, but Dubey said that loop is still being built. The company also says it has trained 70,000 staff on AI, employs 10,000 marketers globally, and still needs agencies, including Publicis as media agency of record, to wrangle a 40-brand portfolio. The subtext: the machine can generate content fast; deciding what any of it is *for* remains stubbornly human.
Read more at Digiday.