AI Product Discovery Moves From Sideshow to Core Strategy
AI product discovery in enterprise brands means using OpenAI models not only for chat-based support, but as a central engine for building, testing, and distributing consumer experiences across booking flows, marketing content, and interactive tools that shorten the path from intent to transaction. The important shift is that travel and beauty companies are no longer treating generative AI as a novelty chatbot sitting on the edge of the customer journey. Omio and L’Oréal are embedding OpenAI enterprise integration directly into how they design products, run engineering operations, and shape search behavior. That matters because whoever owns AI-led discovery will own demand. Brands that connect their inventory, creative systems, and product data into ChatGPT business applications are quietly rewriting the map for how consumers choose a train route or a foundation shade.
Omio: AI-Powered Booking Systems Start With Rebuilt Operations
Omio’s multimodal travel platform integrates OpenAI models across its engineering operations to accelerate travel product development and launch booking interfaces. This is not decoration; the CTO has rejected the superficial addition of technology to outdated processes and demanded that teams redesign their execution frameworks to operate as a native AI enterprise. Codex is embedded across the full software development lifecycle—research, architectural planning, coding, automated testing, reviews, and maintenance—and connected to proprietary data so engineers can move from information retrieval straight to task execution. Internal analysis shows the effort needed to build specific products has fallen to about 20 percent of previous levels, with quarter-long projects now handled by one engineer in about a month. Faster cycles have direct customer impact: AI-powered booking systems can be launched sooner, tested with live travelers, and iterated before competitors have moved past the prototype.
From ChatGPT Experiments to Conversational Commerce in Travel
Omio’s story also shows how ChatGPT business applications evolve once the plumbing is in place. After a preliminary rollout of base ChatGPT access to build familiarity, Omio expanded its integration into a dedicated ChatGPT experience and then launched one of the earliest conversational travel booking interfaces in 2023 by connecting OpenAI models directly to its proprietary transportation inventory. Travelers can ask for the fastest route between cities or compare flights and trains in natural language; the generative models analyse text inputs, ping the booking systems, and return directly bookable itineraries spanning trains, buses, ferries, and flights. This is AI-led product discovery in practice: the interface collapses search, comparison, and checkout into a single conversation. The deployment points to a future where travel planning relies entirely on interacting with intelligent systems wired into live transport networks, not scrolling through static timetables.
L’Oréal: Treating AI as a Discovery Surface, Not a Gadget
In beauty, L’Oréal is taking a similarly aggressive stance, expanding its generative AI production system CreAItech through a foundational partnership that gives teams access to OpenAI’s latest models for product discovery and creative production at scale. The system already blends tools from multiple AI providers, and the company is clear-eyed about why OpenAI models belong in the stack: different strengths for different creative needs, including text-to-image quality. This deal highlights a shift from using generative AI purely as a production accelerator to treating it as a distribution and discovery surface that brands need to manage deliberately. L’Oréal plans AI try-on experiences for Maybelline directly inside ChatGPT and will feed up-to-date product information so AI answers reference the company’s own notes when consumers ask about its lines. According to Gartner’s Greg Carlucci, generative AI is reshaping beauty discovery as consumers move from browsing websites to AI-led search experiences.
Faster Time-to-Market Today, AI-Led Demand Tomorrow
L’Oréal is not dabbling. Its tech investment reached around €1.5 billion (approximately USD 1.98 billion, approx. RM9.22 billion) in 2025, it aims to equip about 10,000 marketing staff to work inside CreAItech, and it has trained 70,000 employees in AI use. The payoff is measurable: the company reports that CreAItech has cut production costs by 40 percent and supported the creation of 50,000 marketing assets, a combination that allows more creative iteration where fatigue is common. It is already testing paid advertising in ChatGPT with brands like CeraVe, SkinCeuticals, and Garnier, and using AI systems to help craft briefs and manage relationships with 500,000 creators a year. Omio’s compressed engineering timelines tell a similar story: OpenAI models reduce the effort and time required for consumer-facing features, opening room to test more ideas and kill weak ones fast. The conclusion is blunt: AI-led discovery will be owned by brands that embed OpenAI into their operations, not those that treat ChatGPT as a side project.
