WWD Beauty CEO Summit : How AI is Personalising the Beauty Industry

As at many recently attended events, presentation times for speakers had been reduced to a maximum of 20 minutes (TED style) and so the day-and-a-half programme featured nearly 30 keynotes, panels and interviews.

Amid the messages from key sponsors, there were some engaging and insightful sessions, including WWD’s beauty and fashion market editor James Manso leading a conversation on Fragrance Redefined with the brilliantly intuitive and knowledgeable Veronique Gabai-Pinsky; Mecca co-founder Jo Horgan on the opening of the world’s largest beauty emporium in Melbourne, Australia; and Jenny B Fine, WWD’s executive editor, beauty, interviewing the redoubtable legend Diane von Furstenberg.

Drawing on research across fashion, retail, hospitality and travel, Chris Sanderson and Madeleine Boyd’s presentation, The AI Makeover: The Future of Authenticity in an Artificial Era, considered how AI offers new creative opportunities but also presents real risks to trust, individuality and customer connection.

Central to the keynote was the premise that:

‘Beauty will be to the luxury industry what fashion has been since the 1990s – the driver of change, the benchmark of future expectations.’

‘Beauty will be to the luxury industry what fashion has been since the 1990s – the driver of change, the benchmark of future expectations.’

Today, with rapid advances in technology, and especially AI, we have to ask: do these old category boundaries even exist any more? Madeleine Boyd offered the observation that consumers aren’t looking for perfection:

‘They’re searching for meaning – for brands that feel alive, responsive, real, and above all, human.’

From the rise of strange, anti-fluent aesthetics to the curation of mood and emotion, the future of beauty won’t be coded by algorithms or legacy ideals, but by creativity, courage and cultural intuition. This is echoed in our recent beauty macrotrend, The Great Beauty Blur, which suggests that beauty has become monotonous, influenced by powerful algorithms that entrench long-standing ideals. As The Future Laboratory’s insights and engagement director Olivia Houghton recently explained:

‘Beauty has become predictable – and predictable is powerless.’