As smart tech becomes the new normal, so too will Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents—programs trained to replace humans—and there are aspects brands and retailers should be closely considering.

This month, BeautyMatter attended Shoptalk Europe 2025 in Barcelona, Spain—one of Europe's largest and key retail events—to find out more about how technology advances are set to shape the future of retail business for beauty, both online and in-store.

AI—Search Optimization and Shopping

“I'm personally a big fan of AI; it's amazing from an experience perspective, said Vladimir Hanzlik, Senior Vice President of Content and Executive Editor at market research firm eMarketer. “But, frankly, it's quite scary if you're a retailer or brand that relies on search traffic and it's not suddenly coming,” Hanzlik told attendees during his market trends presentation.

“Google isn't forthcoming with the numbers, but there is evidence that clickthrough rates have come down since the introduction of AIO [AI Overviews],” he said. It will be important, therefore, for retailers and brands to start building out strategies to plug this future gap, he said, pushing hard to be present on every platform Google AI scans—from Instagram and TikTok to LinkedIn and Reddit.

Industry also needs to keep in mind that today's shoppers are increasingly turning to AI assistants, he said, and are claiming they enhance their overall experience—the likes of GenAI (generative artificial intelligence) which uses generative models to produce text, images, videos, and other forms of data. “If you are a brand or retailer, you need to think about how you show up on this channel. I'm not suggesting there's a retail apocalypse, but you need to start to think about it … Start thinking about your strategy for optimizing your content for GenAI assistants. How do you want to show up on this channel? Will they find your brand? Your products? It's really important.”

Mark Elkins, General Manager for Global E-Commerce at L'Oréal, agreed investing in technology to keep up with the pace of e-commerce change is critical. “The research we have done shows there are some fundamental pain points in the shopper journey. Consumers want really great advice, but they want it authentically. They're overwhelmed by choice. They want an emotional experience, but they also want convenience. They want it all,” Elkins told attendees.

And L'Oréal is working to solve this, he said, implementing an array of tools for consumers to interact with, from WhatsApp conversations with dermatologists through to virtual try-on tools for makeup and hairstyling, as well as AI tools. L'Oréal Paris, for example, is using GenAI to help consumers find products online, and other parts of the business are using GenAI for content adaptation and coding, he said.

AI–Beauty Bots vs. Humans

Where AI tech will be interesting for beauty, Elkins said, is in enhancing online visibility—developing texts around “need states, occasions, and intent,” for example, rather than functional descriptions. “... Rather than just having the SPF benefits of sunscreen, [a description] needs to be linked to you going on holiday. [Consumer packaged goods] CPG brands will need to provide more of that rich data; the contextual information will need to be read by these AI agents.”

However, Elkins cautions against the overfocus on AI advisors or AI assistants in the beauty space, particularly when it comes to emotion-led products. “There is a lot of debate about having virtual beauty advisors. There's been a lot of hype around that in China. One of our philosophies is that if anyone is going to showcase what a beauty product looks like, it has to be a real person. We're not in the business of fake beauty,” the executive said.

While AI agents will prove useful in guiding consumers towards appropriate technical beauty products, he said relying on AI to help broader and emotional beauty choices enters “more of a danger zone, because how do you communicate that to an agent?”

Tech that improves customer experience will always work, but using technology to entirely replace human connections, particularly in beauty, is not where L'Oréal sees a future, Elkins said. “The research we have done shows people value human connection. These virtual retail try-ons only offer so much.”

AI–Retail Advertising

Alexis Marcombe, CEO of international retail media alliance Unlimitail, said where AI and AI agents will be a “game-changer in almost every way,” is in retail media, as the technology will enable better structuring of data and campaign management. “You will just have to ask what you want your [AI] agent to do, and it will be delivered,” Marcombe said.

And while working with AI agents for retail media campaigns isn't immediately around the corner, he said it isn't that far off either. “Probably between the next 18-24 months, there will be things that work,” he said, though it would likely only be the big players able to roll this out successfully at scale.

Rudolf Schneider, EU Director for Sales Account Management Ads at Amazon, added that AI will certainly help brands achieve better results across retail media—like bolstering small brand exposure via contextual advertizing or helping bigger brands experiment more with ads—but the challenge will be “how to use AI and when to use it.”

Katrina Smart, Vice President for Digital Commerce Europe at commerce marketing agency Mars United Commerce, agreed: “I do think it's going to cause complexity in the short-term, because there's going to be a lot of upskilling needed. But longer-term, it will be amazing.”