How Generative AI Will Shape the Face of the Beauty Industry
According to Divya Kumar, Microsoft’s global head of marketing for search and AI, roughly 10 billion global search queries are made daily.
Of those 10 billion, she said, potentially half go unanswered — and the biggest category among them are shopping inquiries.
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“Shopping is really the biggest category from a search standpoint; beyond finding the right product, just the starting point of even knowing what to look for is such a challenge for a lot of people,” said Kumar at the 2023 WWD Tech Symposium.
Generative AI, she believes, could help minimize friction during the purchase journey by easily connecting consumers with the brands they’re looking for, and vice versa.
“What if I just went in to chat with AI and said, ‘Create a 10-step [skin care] process, or a five-step process for me that is easy, because I don’t have a lot of time?,'” said Kumar, adding that allowing consumers to start their search with an image — whether that be of their own skin, or a product they’re looking to find alternatives to — is another way generative AI can streamline the shopping process.
Samyutha Reddy, head of enterprise marketing at Jasper, anticipates generative AI will shift marketing across industries, yes, but especially in markets as saturated as the beauty industry, where it could become more challenging for brands to preserve their unique identities.
“Your brand story and messaging is so important — as you have hundreds of tools that come out and promise you’re going to be able to market faster and create content faster, all of these questions come around about: ‘How do we stand out? How do we make sure our brand story is still being told in the same way?'” said Reddy.
For a company like Haute.AI, which delivers personalized product recommendations based on user selfies uploaded to its SkinGPT tool, generative AI increases accuracy and efficiency in serving a diverse consumer base.
“Generative AI will help us improve the processing of lots of materials and help us make our R&D much more inclusive and our AI systems much smarter — systems that can perform on any population group,” said Anastasia Georgievskaya, chief executive officer and cofounder at Haut.AI.
Though it may seem daunting that the scope of generative AI and machine learning has yet to be fully realized, this fact could pose a valuable opportunity for those willing to seize it.
“In the immediate short term, I see education as being one of those biggest challenges that we need to overcome as an industry to better unpack the opportunities, and even realize the value, that is already there from a consumer standpoint,” Kumar said.
“You never fail if you never try,” Georgievskaya echoed. “Start using generative AI and observing how your consumers are interacting with it — sometimes use cases are not what you thought they would be originally, and that is very important intel.”
Beyond impacting the marketing landscape, Reddy envisions generative AI could potentially lower the barrier to entry for aspiring founders and creators.
“If we think about the only thing stopping an entire generation of people, regardless of age, from starting a company — it’s some of these essential building blocks like, ‘How do I get the idea out of my head and onto paper?’ or ‘OK, now I have an idea — how do I create a deck, or look for funding?'” she said.
“There’s a ton of content around how AI is either going to solve all the world’s problems or destroy the world, and I would encourage executives and team leaders to think about what are the two or three tools that my team can use, that make us more effective marketers that make us better at our jobs,” Reddy concluded.
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