How Estée Lauder’s AI Agent ConsumerIQ Is Consolidating Data and Streamlining R&D
The Estée Lauder Companies has collected 80 years’ worth of consumer data since its founding — including surveys, clinical trials, promotions, and product usage — and has now made it accessible within a generative AI ecosystem.
Building off a partnership with Microsoft to open an AI innovation lab last year, Estée Lauder is now working with the tech giant’s Copilot Studio on an AI agent called ConsumerIQ that gives employees access to the trove of data so they can identify trends, build marketing assets, inform research, and get products to market faster.
The Benefits
Estée Lauder sought out a solution that consolidated data spread across its 25 brands and extensive operations in 150 countries. Using generative AI, it could deposit data in a single archive and quickly use it to pull up relevant insights. The effort reduces manual research and eliminates duplicative efforts, instead allowing employees to use natural language prompts to query ConsumerIQ and find the information they need.
Example use cases:
- Jumping on social trends: TikTok influencers chat about organic lip gloss and Estée Lauder marketers can search for global consumer behavior trends in the lip gloss category. They can then develop their own campaign using an ELC brand.
- Summarizing data: Employees can ask ConsumerIQ, “What are the latest trends for mascara use among Gen Z?” and receive an answer in seconds — compared to the hours it would take to review and summarize PDFs, per Microsoft.
- New product development: A marketer can submit a prompt to ConsumerIQ asking about beauty routines around products of interest: “What are popular moisturizing routines among customers in Washington state, Oregon, and Idaho?” ConsumerIQ would retrieve PDFs with graphs, pictures, and other graphics, and summarize the information to be used within R&D processes.
“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,” Shilpa Niranjan, a global IT business partner at The Estée Lauder Companies who is working on the AI Task Force developing ConsumerIQ, stated in a Microsoft blog.
Jayesh Mehta, a brand technology leader at Estée Lauder, also a member of the task force, said the alternative was waiting for someone to go research a topic and receive an answer three days later.
Bringing Technologies Together
The technology, when combined with the company’s existing Trend Studio (which launched last year and consolidates consumer behavior profiles), will allow Estée Lauder to better detect market trends, recommend products based on those trends, and then generate marketing copy tailored to those recommendations. Part of this is using an AI agent that will run on Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Search platforms.
The company expects to add even more modules in the future to continue accelerating trend detection and personalization capabilities.
“ELC has such rich proprietary insights. One of the biggest challenges is finding and synthesizing the data quickly across our large, global organization,” said Kalindi Mehta, global VP for foresight and predictive analytics, in a statement on Microsoft’s site. “A central system of shared intelligence prevents teams from spending hours tracking down information, leading to faster speed in decision-making and ensuring the consumer is at the center.”
