OpenAI Partners With Estée Lauder on R&D

On Thursday, the California-based artificial intelligence company OpenAI announced a partnership with Estée Lauder Companies, granting ELC employees access to over 240 new generative pre-trained transformers, or GPTs, to develop and market new products.

Employees have already begun using ChatGPT Enterprise to browse ELC’s data vault of clinical trials, consumer surveys and other documents from the company’s portfolio of over 20 brands, including Clinique and Aveda. (ChatGPT Enterprise, marketed towards organisations rather than consumers, also allows businesses to own and control their business data, which is not used to train OpenAI models.)

“We wanted an enterprise version of ChatGPT that would enable us to protect our most valuable asset, which is 75 plus years of data,” said Jane Lauder, chief data officer and executive vice president of Enterprise Marketing for ELC.

In 2022, “when OpenAI came out with ChatGPT, we asked employees to tell us how they would use it,” added Raheel Khan, ELC’s senior vice president of foresight and growth intelligence. The response was robust: Over 1000 employees submitted ideas to the company on how a tool like ChatGPT, fed by a large language model, could improve daily operations in a variety of departments.

Their feedback was used to develop tools like Fragrance Insights GPT, which can produce customisable trend reports from customer surveys, and Clinical Trials GPT, able to condense ELC’s library of studies into claims like a percentage of hydration added to skin.

ELC reportedly began using generative AI in its customer service interactions as recently as late 2023, and established an “AI Innovation” lab earlier this year with Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI. The company is in the middle of a strategic reset amid a persistent sales decline that has reshuffled its C suite. Jane Lauder, who helped establish the lab, announced in October that she will step down from her roles at the company but remain on the board of directors, and Stéphane de La Faverie will succeed CEO Fabrizio Freda on Jan. 1 2025.

While OpenAI declined to share other fashion and beauty brands they’re working with, a spokesperson said that 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies use OpenAI products.

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