AI isn’t just a buzzword. It’s an industry-wide transformation.

At WWD’s annual Beauty CEO Summit, David Greenberg, chief executive officer, L’Oréal and president, North America Zone, L’Oréal, took the stage to introduce Tsedal Neeley, PhD, Naylor Fitzhugh professor, business administration and senior associate dean for faculty development and research, Harvard Business School. Ahead of her conversation, Greenberg shared a few thoughts of his — first showing what AI created when he asked it for an intelligence briefing, the intended topic of his introduction. He showcased how giving the engine a stronger prompt resulted in a better answer, and discussed the importance of not using AI for AI’s sake but actually finding the value in it for each brand. 

“The challenge we all face is to use AI in a way that brings true value to the business by either making the lives of our teams easier or by helping to unlock new growth opportunities,” he said. 

Neeley then took the stage to deliver a keynote on how technology is transforming industries across the board, with key insights on how brands should think about scale, speed and scope when using AI.

“Scale: you can reach millions and even billions of people with Al, with the organization or the employee base that you have,” she said. “Speed: smarter, faster decisions because of the ability to predict in the right ways, and scope: new products, new services and new innovation.”

Neeley walked through key examples that have used AI with this approach, including Moderna’s vaccine. In terms of product launches, Tsedal pointed to fast-fashion brand Shein, which has deployed AI to predict and confirm trends.

“The first thing that they do is they start with a minimum factor order of about 100 products, and then they put it up on their platform,” she said. “Then they’re looking for signals from consumers through data and algorithms to determine whether or not that product is going to be popular. They can have these predictions inform them on whether or not something is going to do well, and they can go from 100 products to 100,000 products in one week…. Because they have data, and they know how to do data. They can have predictions that are unexpected.” 

Like these examples, AI can be used in beauty in myriad ways from predicting trends and the success of future products to streamlining processes. 

According to Neeley, if brands aren’t already using AI they are behind the curve and will have to play catch-up, especially as the updates to the engine are happening so rapidly. To close her talk, Neeley left the audience with what she considers the most crucial piece of advice when it comes to implementing AI across a business.

“The biggest driver of success is that when you bring in new technology, you’ve got to bring in new processes,” she said, adding that implementing AI on top of old systems is the biggest mistake a company can make. “If you bring AI, you’ve got to change the company too.”