Sephora expanded its partnership with Google to become the first prestige beauty retailer to enable shopping directly inside Google’s AI-powered platform through Google Agentic Checkout.
In practice, this keeps shoppers on Google. They can ask beauty questions, research ingredients, compare recommendations in real time, build a routine, add products to basket, and check out without visiting Sephora’s own site or app.
The move sits inside Sephora’s broader “connected AI ecosystem,” which already includes a Sephora App in ChatGPT, Sephora’s proprietary AI Beauty Chat on its website and app, and AI-enabled skin diagnostics in stores and digital channels. Sephora also has plenty of first-party fuel for personalization: 80 million active Beauty Insider members worldwide. Future phases of the Google partnership are expected to integrate Beauty Insider, bringing account-linked personalization into Google’s environment — assuming the plumbing, permissions, and platform politics behave.
Sephora is also careful to say the robots aren’t taking anyone’s apron. Nadine Graham, gm of e-commerce at Sephora North America, framed AI as a sidekick to store staff, pointing to Beauty Skin Scan, its in-store tool launched in 2021. The tool averages more than 180,000 scans per month, with beauty advisors using the results during consultations.
On the app, Smart Skin Scan has a completion rate of more than 80% among users who start the diagnostic. Graham said shoppers who add products to basket convert and spend at higher rates, though no figures were shared. AI Beauty Chat, meanwhile, leads more than 20% of users to make a purchase the same day.
The tension is not subtle. Sephora wants to “be where the consumer is” as discovery shifts into LLMs, but it also has to keep product advice accurate and brand-safe when it is delivered inside someone else’s AI interface. Hence the emphasis on partnerships, multimodal content, and knowing exactly which data is wandering around where.
Full story at Glossy.