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Today beauty trends move fast. A moisturizer that’s hot among Generation Z one month is cold the next and The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. (ELC), one of the world’s best-known names in beauty, needs to move even faster.
So The Estée Lauder Companies turned to Microsoft 365 Copilot for a boost. Together, the partners are building a generative AI ecosystem, with Copilot Studio, Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Search, to gather data, identify trends, build marketing assets, inform research and generally move moisturizers, lip glosses and makeup to market faster.
Estée Lauder has been in business for nearly 80 years and can call on a wealth of consumer data, such as surveys, clinical trials, promotions and product usage. Its ConsumerIQ, an agent built in Copilot Studio, will place that consumer data – one of its greatest competitive advantages – at the fingertips of employees.
With ConsumerIQ, Estée Lauder can respond rapidly to the fickle tastes of consumers. A marketing director, for example, won’t waste time searching for a customer survey or worse, creating a report that already exists. Instead, they’ll use natural language prompts to ask ConsumerIQ to find what they need.
Say an influencer is raving about an organic lip gloss on TikTok. A marketing team can tap into the company’s decades of data to learn how customers use lip gloss in markets around the world. Then they can market one of their own, like Blooming Shine Nourishing Lip Glaze from ELC’s sustainable Origins brand, or develop a new one.
“This is now as simple as asking a question and getting an answer,” says Jayesh Mehta, a brand technology leader at Estée Lauder and a member of its AI Task Force. “Bringing the information (to) the fingertips as opposed to waiting for somebody to go research and bring that output three days later.”
It’s part of Estée Lauder’s broader corporate vision, Beauty Reimagined, to make the company leaner, faster and more agile. Early on, leaders recognized the role AI, and specifically Microsoft Copilot and agents, could play in the drive for transformative innovation, bold efficiencies and a reimagination of how ELC works.
Put simply, with Microsoft’s help Estée Lauder is leveraging the speed and power of AI to help drive change and growth. And there’s a lot at stake. Generative AI’s impact could generate $9 billion to $10 billion in the beauty industry around the globe, McKinsey & Company reported in January 2025.
“Generative AI represents a significant opportunity for the beauty industry – creating more engaging customer experiences, getting products into the hands of consumers faster, developing new products more efficiently and sustainably and much more,” Shelley Bransten, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Global Industry Solutions, said in April 2024 when the two companies announced the creation of the AI Innovation Lab, the next step in their strategic partnership.
Estée Lauder’s edge: A high IQ
The Estée Lauder Companies’ challenge has been that this data is spread among the company’s nearly 25 brands and the roughly 150 countries it operates in. With generative AI, its ConsumerIQ agent will analyze the company’s archives and data to quickly pull up the most relevant insights, to help the team market its current products or develop a new one.
It can, for example, take hours to find, review and summarize PDFs and PowerPoints for use in a marketing campaign. With ConsumerIQ, an employee can ask the agent: “What are the latest trends for mascara use among Gen Z?” In seconds, ConsumerIQ will collect, summarize and deliver the answer.
This frees the marketing team to focus on higher value work like developing a marketing strategy for a mascara that appeals to Gen Z customers.
Let’s say an ELC brand is thinking about introducing a new moisturizer in the Pacific Northwest. A marketing lead can submit a simple prompt to ConsumerIQ: “What are popular moisturizing routines among customers in Washington state, Oregon and Idaho?” ConsumerIQ searches a trove of documents, often complex PDFs with graphs, pictures and other graphics, retrieves relevant information and shares it – in seconds.
“I don’t have to read through 300 documents anymore. I just ask the question and it goes in precisely and runs through the entire data set and then gives me the answer,” says Shilpa Niranjan, a global IT business partner at The Estée Lauder Companies who is working on the AI Task Force developing ConsumerIQ.
Finding what’s hot – and acting fast
Data is powerful, but it means little if you don’t use it. That’s where the second part of Estée Lauder’s generative AI ecosystem, Trend Studio, comes in.
For decades, the Consumer Insights Team has created in-depth reports on consumer behavior and trends – what customers really want.
To harness this, ELC is building an agent, largely with Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Search, to detect market trends, recommend products based on those trends, generate marketing copy with AI that’s tailored to recommended products and even offer Virtual Try-On Technology to show how a product will look. An entire process is streamlined and Estée Lauder gets the right product to customers faster.
Speed and agility are overriding goals of ConsumerIQ and Trend Studio and together will accelerate the time from detecting a trend to responding. These goals tie directly into pillars of Estée Lauder’s corporate transformation: remove complexity, simplify how employees work and empower faster decision-making.
As important, Estée Lauder will leverage its competitive advantage in the fast-moving world of prestige beauty, where smaller companies often quickly respond to the latest trends.
“Beauty startups may be able to leap on the latest TikTok trend, but they don’t have 80 years of market knowledge like Estée does,” says Kalindi Mehta, global vice president for consumer foresight, strategy and predictive analytics at Estée Lauder. “And now Estée has the technology to harness it.”
These generative AI tools will save decision makers critical time and free employees from time-sucking, often mundane work. The tools will also cut down on repetitive work, since it will be far easier to know what has already been done across Estée Lauder’s brands.
Only the beginning
ConsumerIQ and Trend Studio are only the latest steps in Estée Lauder’s AI transformation.
“They’re really looking at this as an AI platform and they can continue adding modules that enhance the experience to essentially…accelerate the time from detecting a trend on TikTok, matching it to a product and then making that marketable to the consumer in a way that they’re asking to receive it,” says Alexa Higgins, a global client director at Microsoft, who works with Estée Lauder.
In the future, for example, an agent could streamline manufacturing training. Instead of slogging through a dense training manual to learn how to perform one process, an employee could simply ask an agent to fetch instructions for that process in seconds.
“It’s all part of our innovation mindset of ‘Hey, we need to be faster to leverage these technologies to enable our business in a new and different way,’” says Jennifer Lee, director of strategic initiatives and predictive analytics at Estée Lauder. “It’s really increasing our speed to be able to compete in the marketplace.”
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