The future of beauty will be in agentic artificial intelligence, with a personalized AI created by brands in-house, according to Wayne Liu, president and chief growth officer of Perfect Corp.
Speaking at WWD Beauty Inc’s LA Beauty conference, Liu said the company “lives and breathes AI” from big household name brands to small brands to help them digitally transform. While most companies are focused on generative AI for the second wave, Liu said agentic AI is the next frontier for beauty.
“Agentic AI is important for the beauty industry because you need to sense the world,” he explained. “You need to be able to learn your customer and you’re able to act.”
Today, a brand has access to its customer and preference data, product ingredients and technology. All of this has to be uploaded into platforms such as ChatGPT to make it smarter, but this results in a loss of AI sovereignty.
“If we cannot offer to run this big data center anymore, power, water and land, that’s why a smaller model on your premises, running on a PC ideally, is the trend looking ahead,” said Liu. “Your AI needs to have intelligence and act for your customer. In beauty, you need the vertical data which trains specifically for the brand, with your social media feed, all your posts and your customer survey data to train your own beauty agent.”
He also said that when creating a brand’s beauty AI agent, it needs a persona to function as a beauty adviser or expert to answer customer questions.
“The industry is sitting on the edge of agentic AI. There are lots of things coming but also lots of uncertainty but lots of opportunity. What will define a winning brand in the next 10 years? It’s really about how you strategize intelligence — not just artificial intelligence, but artificial intelligence and the human intelligence combined,” concluded Liu.
