This is Estée Lauder plugging into Microsoft’s AI ‘power plant’ to add smart, chatty, creative capabilities across its beauty business—things like product content, marketing copy, and internal decision support—without having to build the AI from scratch.
Reduces the cost and time of creating and managing content and insights across a large global beauty portfolio by leveraging Microsoft’s generative AI instead of bespoke, manual processes.
The defensibility likely comes from Estée Lauder’s proprietary consumer, product, and brand data combined with Microsoft’s cloud and AI stack, embedded into existing workflows and marketing/commerce systems.
Frontier Wrapper (GPT-4)
Unknown
Medium (Integration logic)
Context window cost and ongoing inference spend as usage scales across brands and geographies.
Early Majority
Large-scale beauty brand using a hyperscaler’s generative AI platform with deep integration into brand and consumer data; differentiation depends on how tightly they embed the models into marketing, ecommerce, and product workflows versus generic AI pilots.