As AI reshapes the consumer journey, L’Oréal is rethinking its marketing engine

Asmita Dubey has spent her career chasing each new layer of marketing technology, from the old campaign era in 1997 to Excel, data, e-commerce, search, TikTok, and social listening. Now, as L’Oréal Group’s chief digital and marketing officer, she says AI is not just another tool to add to the stack. It is changing the stack itself.

At L’Oréal, that means marketing is getting pulled closer to data and IT. Dubey says the company now puts those teams together to look at the processes, the architecture, and whether the marketing engine is ready for what comes next. The group’s AI plan has three parts: training employees to work with AI, using it across functions like marketing, research, and operations, and figuring out how AI is changing the consumer journey.

That last part is the one that matters most. Dubey says the old fear was that AI would collapse the customer journey because everything could happen in one place, very quickly. Instead, she says it is stretching the journey out. People who used to spend a few minutes searching now spend 11 minutes chatting with AI, which forces brands to think differently about content and credibility. In a traditional search result, a brand wants to show up near the top. In an AI-mediated answer, it has to be useful and trustworthy enough to get included at all.

L’Oréal is already testing ads in Google’s AI Overviews and working with OpenAI, Amazon, and Alibaba as it maps how beauty products get discovered through AI search. Dubey says more than a billion consumers are on these platforms, asking questions about life, birthdays, parties, travel, and beauty. That makes the consumer journey a live business problem, not a theory exercise.

Behind the glossy talk sits a lot of plumbing. Dubey says almost 20% of L’Oréal’s marketing investments are now AI-led, and ROI measurement already leans heavily on machine learning and AI. The company has also brought its beauty research into an internal intelligence platform, so employees can query it conversationally. Product development, formulation, image, text, and video creation are all moving further into data-driven and generative AI territory. Standardizing advertising accounts and product data across Google and Meta is part of the job too.

Dubey’s point is simple enough: AI does not replace the basics of marketing. A system may know 100,000 SKUs, but that does not tell it what a brand should be famous for. A sunscreen can be described by SPF 50, or by the moment someone actually needs it. L’Oréal even made 20 senior executives create an ad with AI from start to finish, which feels like the right kind of homework. You can’t outsource understanding to the machine and then act surprised when the machine runs the show.