-: I know Beauty Genius was developed
in partnership with BCG.
That it was, I believe, presented at CES.
Tell me a little bit about what it is and how it came to be.
-: Yeah, so,
I'm happy to talk about Beauty Genius. (chuckles)
It's a fantastic project.
It's actually a virtual beauty advisor
available 24/7 in your pocket.
It adopts the form of a chat,
but it's fully multimodal
because it also provides skin diagnoses,
virtual try-ons for makeup and hair color,
video tutorials, and so on.
You can ask it anything about skin,
about hair, about makeup,
or any information on any L'Oréal Paris product:
ingredients, the science behind,
how to use it, and so on and so forth.
The way it was born,
as I said when I talked about AI disruption,
it's a dream that we had to bring service
in a self-service world.
Because at the consumer product division,
most of the products are sold online or in supermarkets
where you normally don't have advice.
So it was a dream,
and it became possible thanks to generative AI.
Now, to create it,
honestly, we just did what we always do
when we create products,
we listened to consumers.
-: Tell me a little bit what the main sort of challenges
and lessons do you think the group learned?
-: I would say that my first lesson
was the trap of the apparent ease of AI.
Because, at first, it seems magical.
You go on Midjourney or DALL-E or Stable,
you just type anything or even an emoji,
and it gives you a fantastic, beautiful image,
and then you're like, "Whoa, I'm an artist." (chuckles)
And for conversational agent,
it's basically the same thing.
You can get a roughly functioning tool in a matter of hours.
But to go from there to our vision of Beauty Genius
that is an expert, reliable, safe beauty advisor
that is also based and built on a secure, trustworthy AI
that is reflecting and aligned with our values
of diversity and inclusivity in the way it answers,
there is a huge gap, you know?
So my first lesson was behind the trap of apparent ease,
it is a major transformation,
and the dimension of efforts needed
to successfully transition to AI for a company
is actually really, really huge.
And that's something that we are preparing
with the 8,000 experts of data, digital, and tech
that we have with L'Oréal.
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