Story by Sam Bradley. This story was originally published on Glossy’s sibling publication Digiday.
OpenAI’s advertising platform remains a building site, but marketers remain incredibly keen to forge alliances with the generative AI leader.
L’Oréal is the latest to strike a deal, this week unveiling a partnership that gives it a leg up in product discovery and enables it to use the organization’s latest models in its CreAItech marketing production system. Subsidiary brand Maybelline is also set to develop a virtual “try-on” app to be integrated into ChatGPT itself.
The beauty company made the announcement as its chief digital and marketing officer, Asmita Dubey, prepared to take the stage at the Paris tech conference VivaTech on June 19. Executives from LVMH, Google and Renault also appeared at the conference.
Dubey spoke to Digiday in Paris, atop an expansive conference installation the firm erected to showcase its AI prowess in both producing marketing materials and creating cutting-edge beauty products. (The staff in white coats and rows of bubblegum pink wigs evoke, perhaps unintentionally, the Beauty School Dropout scene from “Grease“).
“We’re both eager to do a foundational partnership,” she said. “We believe we can be more demanding of AI.”
The ChatGPT deal is the latest milestone passed by L’Oréal under Dubey’s guidance. A company veteran of 13 years, her role has been transformed by the emergence of generative AI.
Her double-sided brief (Dubey is also chief digital officer) means she’s tasked with shepherding the 117-year-old company through seismic changes in how consumers search for and buy beauty products and how beauty brands market themselves. It also extends to equipping its R&D division with new tools; the OpenAI deal also includes access to GPT-Rosalind, a reasoning model built for the life sciences sector.
CreAItech is used by L’Oréal’s internal marketing teams to rapidly spin up stills and video for earned, owned and paid social, e-commerce and other environments that require vast quantities of images. For a small group of very large advertisers, such systems are becoming de rigeur.
According to Gartner, 70% of CMOs say that shaping their companies into AI leaders is a critical objective, and marketing organizations are allocating, on average, 25% of their budgets to AI investments. In L’Oréal’s case, its 2025 tech investment reached around €1.5 billion ($1.98 billion).
“In beauty specifically, this move is especially timely, as generative AI reshapes how consumers discover and interact with brands, as personal care brands are experiencing a decline in website traffic as consumers shift toward AI-led search experiences, and nearly one in five consumers now use generative AI tools to find information,” said Gartner analyst Greg Carlucci.
L’Oréal’s aim is to enable the company’s 10,000-strong marketing staff worldwide not only to build assets quickly and cheaply but to switch between models and tools as appropriate to the brief.
L’Oréal began working on CreAItech in 2024 and rolled it out in earnest last year; the system now incorporates models and tools from Seedance, Google (Gemini, Veo3 and Imagen), Adobe and Stable Diffusion. It inked a deal with Nvidia in 2025 in pursuit of more efficient GPU usage as it scaled up the operation. The OpenAI deal marks the beauty company’s latest development milestone, Dubey explained.
“They [AI models] come with different strengths. We want to add OpenAI’s image model because the text-to-image rendering is so good,” she said.
In the company’s recent full-year earnings call, CEO Nicolas Hieronimus told analysts that the system had reduced production costs by 40%, while its staff had used CreAItech’s suite of tools to craft 50,000 marketing assets. “We have to learn to master the tools, but it’s really a new era,” he said.
The OpenAI deal will also change how L’Oréal products appear in AI-generated responses. The company will now provide up-to-date product information directly to OpenAI for inclusion in the underlying models that power ChatGPT. Though it won’t mean putting a thumb on the scale for the beauty company (something OpenAI leadership has been adamant about dispelling), it means that when users request information about those products, the AI tool will pull from L’Oréal’s own notes rather than only from the alphabet soup of product reviews, Reddit posts and wiki pages its foundational models are trained upon.
L’Oréal is already among the advertisers running paid spend on ChatGPT. Dubey said the company had been running ads on the AI app since April. “We are testing the advertising product to see what consumers are [looking at], whether they click to buy, and we’re doing that scale with our CeraVe, pharmaceutical and Garnier brands in the U.S.,” she said, without providing specific results. (“It’s early days,” she noted.)
L’Oréal uses a proprietary tool called BETiQ to track the impact of its AI systems. And like the AI-driven creative production and media planning systems built by other large advertisers, such as Unilever and Kellanova, L’Oréal intends for BETiQ and CreAItech to provide automated creative effectiveness data that can inform media decisions. Though the company has been building out the rudiments of such a flywheel via a partnership with CreativeX, Dubey said it’s still more of an ambition than reality, especially given the variety of metrics that might be used to measure AI success, from hours saved and the volume of content produced to media measures such as ROAS and click-through rates.
“Whenever we think about measurement, we are thinking about reduce, increase, improve,” she said.
Still, Dubey said the advertiser is already reinvesting the hours saved by the system back into its marketing operation. It increased worldwide advertising and promotions spending (already a large proportion of sales, at 32%) by 10% compared with its 2024 outlay, to $15.48 billion according to its full-year results.
Roughly 60% of that goes into paid social, though Dubey declined to provide financial specifics on the current overall media mix. Its tilt towards social also includes a heavy focus on creator marketing; the company now works with 500,000 influencers and creators a year, Dubey said. Its AI systems come into play when crafting briefs and managing relationships with those creators, too.
“When you have hundreds and thousands of [creators], you can’t just WhatsApp them,” she said.
CreAItech is an in-house system, and L’Oréal claims to have trained 70,000 of its staff to use AI. But Dubey said that, with a portfolio of 40 brands, there’s still plenty of work for the company’s agencies — not least Publicis Groupe, L’Oréal’s media agency of record and one of the primary backers of VivaTech.
Even if L’Oréal’s attitude to its creative agencies is — for now — unchanged, the addition of the CreAItech rollout to Dubey’s brief has, however, changed her approach to marketing.
“It alters an age-old operating model — what content can be done in a studio? In an agency? What can be done fast, or slow?,” she posed. Even with new questions about who handles a given brief and how they do so, to answer, Dubey argued that the technology can make marketers more creative even as it takes some processes out of their hands.
“I absolutely believe, even more than two years ago,” she concluded, “that it augments creativity.”
