MUMBAI: Beauty may be timeless, but creating it is getting dramatically faster. French cosmetics giant L’Oréal says artificial intelligence is transforming the way it develops new products, with the company claiming the technology has reduced product development timelines by nearly 75 per cent while uncovering new uses for existing ingredients, according to a Reuters report.
Speaking at the Consumer Goods Forum’s Global Summit in Vienna, Fabrice Megarbane, President of L’Oréal’s Consumer Products Division, said AI is helping researchers analyse molecules across the company’s product portfolio to identify new formulations that would previously have taken far longer to discover through conventional research methods.
One recent breakthrough involved repurposing ingredients originally developed for skincare into a shampoo designed to improve hair volume and fullness. According to Megarbane, AI enabled scientists to identify promising molecular combinations and predict how they would perform on both skin and hair, significantly accelerating the research process. L’Oréal began embedding AI into its research laboratories around four years ago as part of a wider strategy to modernise product development. Since then, the company has increasingly relied on machine learning models to study ingredient interactions, enabling researchers to evaluate a far larger number of formulation possibilities in a shorter period.
The technology push follows the launch of L’Oréal’s “beauty stimulus plan” last year, introduced to strengthen innovation after the company reported slower sales growth. The beauty major is part of a wider shift sweeping the global consumer goods industry. Companies including Nestlé, Haleon and Mondelez are increasingly deploying artificial intelligence across research and development to accelerate product innovation, refine recipes and improve supply chain efficiency.
At Mondelez, maker of Cadbury, Oreo and Toblerone, AI is already being used to generate recipe concepts and assess formulations before they move to human experts for final refinement. The company says the approach has reduced the number of physical product samples required during development while improving nutrition, sustainability and cost efficiency across a significant share of its new products.
As AI rapidly moves from experimentation to everyday business operations, the race among consumer goods companies is no longer just about launching the next bestselling product. Increasingly, it is about who can innovate first, test smarter and bring ideas to market faster.