The one takeaway from VivaTech 2026 in Paris this June was that TikTok and Instagram are no longer the primary battlegrounds for capturing shoppers’ attention. All roads lead back to ChatGPT.
Three out of four consumers have recently used the large language models (LLMs) that fuel artificial intelligence chatbots to research beauty, wellness, or longevity topics. And, 25% say AI is their primary shopping research source, according to a recent survey of 5,000 US beauty shoppers conducted by consulting giant BCG and WWD. On OpenAI’s ChatGPT alone, L'Oréal said at the trade show that 5% of the 900 million weekly conversations are about beauty.
“So the question to us is, ‘What is changing?’” Asmita Dubey, L'Oréal Chief Digital & Marketing Officer, rhetorically asked onstage at VivaTech, Europe’s largest technology and startup event. “What is changing is that LLMs are becoming the front door to beauty discovery,” she added.
That shift in consumer behavior explains why beauty manufacturers and technology companies had a particularly prolific presence at VivaTech. The cosmetics industry’s leaders have begun to acknowledge that there’s increased pressure to develop new generative engine optimization (GEO) strategies to promote product discovery across ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini.
Among the beauty technologies displayed at VivaTech were a variety of AI-enabled tools for skin, fragrance, and hair; early inroads being made in agentic AI; partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI hyperscalers; and the early stages of embracing agentic commerce.
South Korean beauty tech startup Bonjac exhibited its AI fragrance recommendation technology, designed to make online shopping easier, in partnership with the French fragrance and flavor manufacturer Robertet Group. Another startup, Haut.AI, showed off its AI skin analysis technology, which evaluates roughly 29 skin health and beauty parameters and over 150 facial biomarkers across more than 3 million data points.
Samsung’s booth featured AI Beauty Screen (also known as the AI Beauty Mirror), developed with South Korean conglomerate Amorepacific, to assess a user’s skin condition. The smart mirror uses camera-based optical diagnostics to analyze pore condition, redness, pigmentation, and wrinkles, then recommends personalized skincare solutions based on a dataset of over 450,000 cases, according to Amorepacific.
The electronics giant also promoted a skin and scalp analysis tool with Becon, a startup that sprouted out of Samsung’s research innovation program in 2019. Becon was spun out a year later and received investment from Samsung Ventures in a seed round of funding in 2021.
VivaTech also set the stage for new AI-focused announcements from L'Oréal and AI and augmented-reality company Perfect Corp.
On June 18, L'Oréal announced a new strategic collaboration with OpenAI to bring virtual beauty experiences directly into ChatGPT, lauded new AI use cases focused on hair and skin, and touted an in-house generative AI content platform called CreAItech that’s used by the company’s marketers and designers to speed up the creation of images, videos, and other materials, but which also includes a CO2 estimator to promote sustainability at a time when consumers have expressed concerns about AI’s environmental impact.
Dubey said L'Oréal has been rethinking what consumer dialogues look like with an AI chatbot, bolstering searchable online data to capture market-leading positions on LLMs, and beginning to seriously consider autonomous purchasing in the form of agentic commerce.
Perfect Corp. unveiled an AI beauty assistant that has agent-to-agent integration, which is a protocol that allows agents to work collaboratively to solve a problem. The AI Beauty Agent is compatible with Claude and ChatGPT, and brands will be able to plug their AI agents directly into Perfect’s AI capabilities.
LVMH CEO and Chairman Bernard Arnault took the stage at VivaTech, which was founded in 2016 by French ad giant Publicis Groupe and LVMH’s media and publishing division’s Groupe Les Échos, to share an anecdote about his own weekly usage of AI.
Arnault’s personal embrace of AI is a reflection of the rising prominence of the technology as a key issue for the executives who sit in the corner office. Nearly three-quarters of CEOs say they are the main decision-makers on AI for their organizations, according to a 2026 survey conducted by BCG, up from about half a year ago.
While Arnault praised the prowess of designers who work for the luxury goods conglomerate, “I am not always satisfied,” he added, sharing the stage with Publicis Groupe Emeritus Chairman Maurice Lévy. Each week, Arnault said he hosts a design session to develop new products with AI. “We design products and then make them a reality,” added Arnault. “Maybe one of them will be a big success. I don’t know.”
L'Oréal’s AI-focused innovations touted at VivaTech mostly centered on hair and skin, two categories that account for close to two-thirds of the company’s total sales. These newer AI use cases include the application of L'Oréal’s proprietary Longevity AI Cloud to analyze over 260 biomarkers to map skin health at a biological level, which can then be used to predict the impact of ingredients before physical testing begins.
Another tool developed by L’Oréal, the Hair Digital Twin, uses AI algorithms and 3D virtual modeling to screen molecules and forecast product performance. “You can modelize the structure of the hair—color, length, sun exposure—and then you can predict which product will work the best,” Delphine Viguier-Hovasse, L’Oréal’s Chief Innovation & Prospective Officer, shared onstage at VivaTech. “The digital twin really helps the prediction.”
Dubey said L'Oréal was currently conducting tests with e-commerce giants Amazon and Alibaba to bolster the information that’s listed on the manufacturer’s product pages, which it hoped would help enhance GEO search and discovery. “We are trying to pilot and test and learn along the way in order to reinvent beauty experiences,” Dubey said.
She added that there are seven core principles that guide L'Oréal’s overall AI strategy: a requirement for human oversight; respecting data privacy; transparency and explainability; using data that’s representative of diverse populations; holding AI practitioners accountable for their usage; the establishment of a generative AI governance-focused task force; and a commitment to AI sustainability.
L'Oréal’s CO2 estimator within CreAItech gives creators a “small nudge” to show how much energy or water is being used when designing with AI. This feature is intended to help mitigate some of the environmental impacts of generative AI, which stresses energy grids and local water resources, as well as increasing costs. Major companies such as Amazon and Walmart have recently aimed to cap employee usage of AI tools as compute costs have risen sharply.
“Introducing that notion of responsibility in the small everyday acts that we do, while we augment human creativity, is a small step, but a step we are proud of,” Dubey said.
While beauty giants and an ecosystem of startups are all-in on AI, the sector is still in the very early innings of understanding how the technology is changing research and development, product ideation, and marketing, altering workflows, and upending commerce.