From generic chatbot to retail engine
OpenAI’s move into enterprise partnerships with beauty and retail brands turns ChatGPT from a general-purpose assistant into a commerce engine that merges AI try-on technology, product discovery, and advertising inside a single conversational interface, giving brands a direct path into the AI-led searches that are replacing traditional website visits and search clicks.
This is not a side hustle; it is a strategic rewire of OpenAI’s business model. By tying its models into L’Oréal’s CreAItech system and bringing Maybelline’s virtual try-on straight into ChatGPT, OpenAI is embedding itself in the most valuable seconds of the purchase journey, where intent is high and patience is low. At the same time, the company has walked into the global ad festival circuit, declared itself “clearly in the advertising business,” and mapped out a path to multi-billion-dollar ad revenue. The message is blunt: the future of AI is not only subscriptions and APIs, but enterprise partnerships that turn product discovery into a monetized, AI-mediated experience.
L’Oréal’s CreAItech playbook: AI as studio, shelf, and sales rep
L’Oréal’s deal with OpenAI is the clearest signal yet that large brands now see AI systems as end-to-end commercial infrastructure, not novelty tools. The company calls OpenAI a “foundational” partner inside CreAItech, its in-house generative production system that already pulls from multiple model providers and is used to make still images and video for social and e-commerce placements. That foundation is not cheap: L’Oréal’s tech investment hit around €1.5 billion (approx. USD 1.98 billion / RM9.1 billion) in 2025, with a goal of equipping roughly 10,000 marketing staff to move between AI tools on demand.
The payoff is measurable. CEO Nicolas Hieronimus says CreAItech cut production costs by 40% and supported the creation of 50,000 marketing assets, a combination that rewrites the economics of creative testing. That is a quotable benchmark for every CMO asking whether AI is more hype than help. But the more radical move is what comes next: Maybelline’s virtual try-on is set to live directly inside ChatGPT, and L’Oréal is feeding current product data to OpenAI so answers about its products are grounded in the brand’s own notes rather than generic web noise. Production, shelf presence, and sales conversation are collapsing into one AI-powered system.
ChatGPT as product discovery layer, not banner farm
The L’Oréal partnership is really about discovery, not only content output. A core piece of the deal is how L’Oréal products show up inside AI-generated answers when someone asks ChatGPT for beauty advice or product recommendations. L’Oréal is supplying up-to-date product information directly into OpenAI’s models so that responses can rely on the company’s own notes instead of scraping together impressions from reviews, forums, and wiki-style content. That is a power shift: brands now have a formal channel into the AI layer that increasingly sits between consumers and the open web.
Gartner’s Greg Carlucci ties this urgency to a clear behavioural shift: generative AI is changing how people find and interact with brands, and personal care brands are already seeing website traffic fall as consumers move to AI-led search experiences. Meanwhile, L’Oréal is testing paid advertising in ChatGPT with CeraVe, SkinCeuticals, and Garnier, even if it is early and results are not yet public. Put bluntly, discovery is leaving search bars and category pages and moving into chat windows where recommendations, brand-owned data, and ads blend into a single guided conversation.
OpenAI’s ad pivot: from attention economy to “intelligence economy”
OpenAI’s appearance at Cannes was a coming-out party for a new kind of ad business built on intent-rich conversations rather than interruptive impressions. The company’s chief revenue officer told a room of CMOs that OpenAI is now “clearly in the advertising business,” and backed it with numbers: an ad product launched in February has already crossed USD 100 million (approx. RM460 million) in annualized revenue within six weeks, with more than 600 advertisers on board. The projection is even bolder—USD 2.5 billion (approx. RM11.5 billion) in ad revenue by year-end, climbing to USD 11 billion (approx. RM50.6 billion) in 2027, USD 25 billion (approx. RM115 billion) in 2028, and USD 100 billion (approx. RM460 billion) by 2030.
This model hinges on what OpenAI calls a move from the “attention economy” to an “intelligence economy,” where the user is not glancing at a banner but actively asking which laptop to buy or which airline to book. According to the company, about one-fifth of ChatGPT queries already carry commercial intent in categories such as travel, retail, and financial services. That is catnip for advertisers, even if early cost-per-thousand and click-through numbers lag search incumbents. The timeline is also telling: attendance at Cannes, a structured rollout from high-minimum pilots to a self-serve platform for smaller advertisers, and an IPO track where ad revenue becomes the third leg of a business that previously relied on subscriptions and compute-hungry APIs.
What this means for retail and beauty—and for OpenAI
Enterprise AI partnerships are quietly redrawing the map of product discovery in retail and beauty. L’Oréal’s CreAItech integration with OpenAI is pitched as supporting discovery and creative production at scale, but the deeper play is control over how its products appear in the AI answers that consumers increasingly trust. In this world, the “shelf” is whatever the model suggests in response to a prompt, and brands that plug structured data, virtual try-ons, and ad spend into that layer will crowd out those that leave it to chance.
For OpenAI, every Maybelline try-on session inside ChatGPT and every L’Oréal-supplied product note is more than a feature—it is a monetization channel. ChatGPT is being wired directly into consumer-facing commerce workflows, from answering questions with brand-provided information to running inline paid ads. The company is betting that this blend of enterprise deals and ad-funded discovery will grow with user engagement rather than with raw compute costs, a structure that public markets already know how to value. The risk for brands is clear: opting out means handing those moments of high intent to competitors that are willing to treat AI not as a campaign add-on, but as the new front door to their business.
