How execs from Ulta Beauty, Tarte and Beekman 1802 are implementing AI into workflows

That was the question posed to three longtime industry executives on stage during Glossy’s annual E-Commerce Summit in Miami Beach earlier this month — and the answers may surprise you. 

For example, Jenna Manula Linares, vp of digital marketing and TikTok Shop at Tarte Cosmetics, has recently added 15-minute team check-ins at the end of each weekly meeting that require staffers to share how they used AI that week and whether or not it was successful. 

“We’re creating a culture of experimentation,” she said. “So, what I challenge my teams to do each week is to use AI in a new or different way.” The team then tracks these challenges and results using Tarte’s internal AI program. 

Meanwhile, David Baker, chief revenue officer of the skin-care brand Beekman 1802, has found success in identifying early AI adopters within the brand and empowering them to learn new skills and own tentpole projects. “First and foremost, it’s finding the people who have an interest in it, and giving them the room and space to play,” he said. 

Baker is teaching his team to think of AI as a colleague that works while the rest of the team is off the clock. “Finding and sourcing creators gets really hard, so we’ve built an agentic staffer. Her name is Zoe, and Zoe is designed to source [creators] and draft personalized outreach, so that we can find people who fit our ethos and fit our brand voice really, really well at scale, while we sleep,” he said. 

“AI has permeated every team and workflow we have at Tarte,” Linares said. “I’m constantly telling my team, if it takes you longer than 15 minutes to do something, there’s a faster way, and you should learn and try to figure it out via AI.”

Then there is Ulta Beauty, which rolled out one of the largest AI partnerships within beauty retail last month, with Google Gemini. The team has spent the past few weeks learning how its consumers actually use the new AI-powered features, which include an on-site and in-app chatbot. 

“We continue to find new data sets that we need to put into [the chatbot’s knowledge base, like] store locations, store hours — a lot of those things where customers are just asking generic questions,” said Josh Friedman, svp of digital and e-commerce at Ulta Beauty. “They’re asking lots of questions about the brand, and we’re seeing some really good use cases with our customer care agent, as well.” 

In today’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, host Lexy Lebsack takes listeners live on stage with Ulta Beauty’s Josh Friedman, Tarte’s Jenna Manula Linares and Beekman1802’s David Baker to learn about the actual impact of AI today. 

On day-to-day implementation

Jenna Manula Linares: “I would say AI has permeated every team and workflow we have at Tarte. I’m constantly telling my team, ‘If it takes you longer than 15 minutes to do something, there’s a faster way, and you should learn and try to figure it out via AI.’ For us, one big example that’s been really helpful is concepting — so, using AI to come up with new creative activations for influencers or events, and then also with our creative team. So, when my team is briefing into creative, and we produce all of our creative in-house, I tell them you cannot submit a brief unless you actually submit a designated output that you’d like to receive, so it really helps us go from concept to first draft — not necessarily creating the final output, because within beauty, authenticity and trust are really important. And although an AI agent can spit out 100 pieces of creative, it still takes a human element and approach to make it feel authentically Tarte. … And that has cut down on weeks, if not months, of work, depending on what the actual activation is like. If you’re looking to redesign a website or new landing page, that saves us months of work.” 

On AI being a non-negotiable new skill for direct reports 

David Baker: “…we have the detractors who are very resistant to it for many different [reasons], and some of it’s just repetition [to convert them into AI]. But I think where I’m starting to articulate this more, and we have not articulated as loudly as I’m about to right now, but I feel like everyone’s afraid that AI is coming for their jobs. I mean, it’s literally headlines everywhere. I firmly do not believe that AI is coming for anyone’s job at Beekman 1802, but someone who knows how to use AI is going to come for someone who doesn’t know how to use AI’s job. If you hired a finance person and they were doing spreadsheets with pen and paper, like they used to do in the ‘50s and ‘60s, you’d fire that person. And I think we are getting to the level where we have incredible tools at our disposal, and someone choosing not to use them, that becomes a business risk.” 

On supercharging personalization: 

Josh Friedman: “[Personalization] is definitely helping in the algorithms. So, we know about beauty, we know about you, we want to make sure we’re bringing the right content to the right person at the right time. And it’s helping us, whether it’s identifying the next best behavior, the next best action or the next best content. We’re using it to make all those types of, not full decisions, but certainly putting together the weightings for those.”