L'Oréal generated 44 billion euros in revenue in 2025. Its e-commerce business grew by double digits that year and now accounts for more than 30% of total sales. Against that backdrop, the company is treating ChatGPT, which has 900 million weekly users, as a sales channel worth building a direct relationship with.
The partnership has four distinct pieces. First, Maybelline's virtual try-on tool, which uses L'Oréal's augmented reality technology called ModiFace, will be accessible directly inside ChatGPT conversations. L'Oréal bought ModiFace, a Canadian company founded at the University of Toronto, in 2018. It was the first time L'Oréal had ever acquired a technology company. By the end of 2025, that technology had been used more than 120 million times across 66 countries.
Second, L'Oréal will feed verified product data into ChatGPT to improve how its brands appear when users ask shopping questions in the United States. This matters because ChatGPT is becoming a meaningful place where buying decisions start. Shoppers arriving from ChatGPT converted on Amazon during Black Friday 2025 at 1.7 times the rate of shoppers arriving from Google, with an 11% higher average purchase value. That kind of difference gets attention in any boardroom.
Third, three L'Oréal brands, SkinCeuticals, CeraVe, and Garnier, are joining OpenAI's global advertising pilot inside ChatGPT. That pilot launched in February 2026 and originally required brands to commit at least $200,000 to participate. OpenAI opened a self-serve version in May 2026, removing the minimum spend entirely. Ads appear below ChatGPT's responses, labeled as sponsored, and are only shown to free-tier users, not to paid subscribers.
Fourth, on the research side, L'Oréal is using a model called GPT-Rosalind, which OpenAI built specifically for life sciences work, to map the community of microbes that live on human skin. The goal is to identify beneficial bacteria and use that knowledge to develop new skincare products, starting with La Roche-Posay.
What is the pattern here? L'Oréal is not experimenting with AI in a corner of the business. It has trained 73,000 employees on generative AI, built an internal content platform, introduced personal AI tools for staff, and is now placing its brands inside the world's most used AI assistant at the level of shopping, advertising, and science.
There is a structural implication that goes beyond beauty. When a platform like ChatGPT becomes a place where people research and choose products, the brands that have formal relationships with that platform gain an advantage that is hard to replicate without a similar agreement. L'Oréal feeding verified product data directly to ChatGPT means its brands are better represented in the answers ChatGPT gives to shopping questions. Smaller competitors, or brands in any sector that have not taken this seriously, will simply appear less often, or not at all.
For business operators outside the beauty industry, the relevant question is not about mascara. It is about whether the products or services your company sells could be found, recommended, or filtered out by AI tools that your customers are already using. Sixty-six percent of marketers in a 2026 Adobe Express survey said they expect ChatGPT to drive product discovery by the end of this year. That shift does not require a partnership with OpenAI to prepare for. It requires clean, structured, accurate product information that AI systems can read and use. The brands that will struggle are those relying on vague positioning and marketing language rather than clear, specific, comparable product data.
L'Oréal's move tells you where consumer-facing commerce is heading. Whether you sell cosmetics, industrial supplies, insurance products, or package tours, the companies that make themselves legible to AI-driven discovery tools now will hold an advantage that compounds over time.