Data-driven beauty: How The Estée Lauder Companies unlocks insights with ChatGPT

The Estée Lauder Companies⁠(opens in a new window) (ELC) is a global leader in prestige beauty, with a portfolio of more than 20 iconic brands including Clinique, La Mer, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, and Aveda. The company and its brands are known for leading beauty products paired with high-touch, personalized experiences for its global consumers.

As the world of beauty trends toward hyper-personalization, so has the company's approach to research and technology. ELC’s widespread adoption of ChatGPT Enterprise is helping the company empower employee creativity and unlock insights to better serve today’s consumers.

A photograph of Jane Launder, the company's Enterprise Marketing and Chief Data Officer.

Using AI in a data-rich environment

The global beauty industry moves quickly, and ELC’s product pipeline is influenced by massive amounts of consumer data from surveys, clinical trials, and product usage.

“We were excited to partner with OpenAI because we wanted an enterprise version of ChatGPT that would enable us to protect our most valuable asset, which is 75+ years of data.”

Jane Lauder, Chief Data Officer & EVP, Enterprise Marketing, and member of ELC’s Board of Directors

The ELC team adopted ChatGPT for data processing and analysis at scale. Today, ChatGPT is an integral part of ELC’s workflows, with more than 240 custom GPTs that give their employees greater time and insights to do what they do best: develop new and market existing products with precision, aligned to emerging skincare and beauty trends.

To the left is a close-up of an Estee Lauder Advanced Night Repair serum bottle on a lit stand, emphasizing its luxury appeal. To the right, a modern conference room where people are engaged in discussion around a large table under decorative globe lights.

Surging AI adoption with the GPT Lab

Central to ELC’s rapid adoption of AI was the company’s core belief that creativity lies in every chair. “When OpenAI came out with ChatGPT, we asked employees to tell us how they would use it,” says Raheel Khan, SVP of Foresight and Growth Intelligence at ELC. “Over one thousand people submitted ideas.”

This interest led ELC to establish their GPT Lab: A cross-functional group empowered to experiment and develop business solutions—“custom GPTs”—with ChatGPT.

“Our job is to uncover high-impact use cases that drive value to our different brands and regions,” said Charmaine Pek, ELC’s Director of ChatGPT Enterprise Adoption. “The GPT Lab aims to identify patterns across meaningful use cases and amplify these successes to scale to more brands and regions.”

Unlocking consumer insights with ChatGPT

Over the course of just 10 weeks, the Lab members developed multiple custom GPTs, each with their own purpose and scope.

One of the standout applications created by the GPT Lab is the Fragrance Insights GPT. Developed to help the Fragrance Foresight team extract insights from consumer surveys, the GPT analyzes large consumer survey datasets to uncover trends and preferences, allowing ELC to design products that resonate with different demographics.

“Before, we spent hours manually cleaning and organizing data to uncover insights,” says Yuan Zhan, Director of ELC’s Fragrance Foresight team. “With the Fragrance GPT, we can ask complex questions in plain English, and it combs through the data instantly.”

Lab members also launched the Clinical Trial Data GPT, which quickly extracts insights on skincare product effectiveness—for example, determining the immediate moisturization improvement percentage of a product like Estée Lauder's Advanced Night Repair serum—from thousands of clinical trial reports with a simple query.

Other GPTs include a Copywriting GPT that is a customized copywriting assistant for various brands, designed to craft detailed, meaningful and on-brand content across platforms, and a Vendor Snapshot Creator GPT that synthesizes essential insights about each vendor, including their profile, ELC’s purchase history, and other relevant details.

A professional setting with three scenes. On the left, a person views a laptop screen. In the center, a man in a white shirt sits in front of a laptop, engaged in conversation, with a cityscape backdrop. On the right, a woman walks down the stairs.

Taking a product-led approach to GPT creation

The Estée Lauder Companies structures its GPT creation process like a sprint, focusing on quick prototyping and testing to identify success predictors and build for scale.

“We look at the value the GPT would bring to the organization, and we also look at the effort that is needed,” explains Kingsuk Chakrabarty, Director of Enterprise Architecture, AI and R&D at ELC. “Then we prioritize the GPTs which have high value and can be built quickly.”

Within the GPT Lab, “teams” of people—a business user, a subject matter expert (SME), and a technical lead—are responsible for ensuring each idea is based on impact and feasibility:

Design: the business user defines the purpose, scope, and audience for the GPT in a two-page Use Case Brief to gain clarity before building.
Prepare: the SME shapes the use case by gathering and preparing relevant data, ensuring best practices for GPT development.
Build & Test: the tech lead builds the GPT with sets of data and rigorously tests to assess accuracy and consistency.
Launch: the full team deploys the GPT and a user guide for teams to use.
Pivot & Scale: the full team uses feedback loops to iterate and optimize the outputs based on GPT performance.

“Designing the right use cases means asking the right questions,” shares Pek. “Why do we want to build this GPT? What is the problem that we're trying to solve? What impact will it have?”

By working in iterative cycles and sharing insights, the GPT Lab was able to develop AI-powered prototypes in a number of weeks.

AI’s impact on creativity and speed-to-market

Not only has ChatGPT helped employees work faster, it’s expanded their creative capacity by reducing manual tasks:

Time savings: Across R&D and marketing teams, ChatGPT has improved response time by more than 90%. What once took teams several hours to research—like finding claims about product efficacy—now takes minutes.
Speed to market: By accelerating data analysis, ELC can launch products faster, ensuring they remain responsive to fast-changing consumer trends.
Internal adoption: There’s been enthusiastic adoption of GPT across the organization, with more teams asking to integrate AI into their workflows for creative solutions.

The left image displays the Estée Lauder Team in a meeting room. The right image shows the Estée Lauder Advanced Night Repair Eye Supercharged Gel-Creme Synchronized Multi Recovery cream.

“Using ChatGPT Enterprise has done two things,” says Khan. “One, it allows our incredible human talent to spend more time on tasks that require creativity. And two, it actually increases capability to deliver on what matters most to our consumers.”

ELC plans to apply top GPTs across its portfolio of brands, empowering more teams to take advantage of AI-driven insights and creativity.

“AI enables us to deliver market-leading products on a larger scale, and better. With OpenAI, we’re reducing low-value work for our employees and giving our teams the opportunity to create on a whole new scale,” says Lauder.