Inventing the Beauty of the Future: L’Oréal’s Stéphane Lannuzel

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
How is AI helping one beauty company spot key trends? Find out on today's episode.

**Stéphane Lannuzel** (0:09)
I'm Stéphane Lannuzel from L'Oréal, and you are listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:17)
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each episode, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI.
I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College. I'm also the AI and Business Strategy guest editor at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:35)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG, and I co-lead BCG's AI practice in North America. Together, MIT SMR and BCG have been researching and publishing on AI for six years, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and to deploy and scale AI capabilities, and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:02)
Today, Shervin and I are talking with Stéphane Lannuzel, Beauty Tech Program Director at L'Oréal.
Stéphane, thanks for joining us. Welcome.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (1:09)
Hi, Stéphane.

**Stéphane Lannuzel** (1:11)
Hello. I'm really happy to be talking with you today.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:14)
Let's get started.
Stéphane, you're at L'Oréal. Can you tell us about your current role? What does a Beauty Tech Program Director do?

**Stéphane Lannuzel** (1:22)
I'm in charge of the Beauty Tech Transformation, which is a global transformation of all functions and in all geographies.
And that adventure, Beauty Tech, for me, started in 2019 It was the vision of our CEO at that time, that was Jean-Paul Lagom, that was really visionary in the fact that tech will disrupt the beauty industry. And he really listened and talked with all the CEOs of the big tech companies, asking them the question on what tech will do to beauty, how tech will impact beauty.
And that's how we've started on that journey, saying that we want to be the champion, the leader of Beauty Tech, to be the number one. And because in L'Oréal, we are the leader of the beauty industry, so we decided that we wanted to be the leader of the Beauty Tech. And I started with that mission, being the Beauty Tech Program Director with only these two worlds, beauty and tech. And basically, the simple motto of Beauty Tech is to invent the beauty of the future while transforming into a company of the future. So what I'm doing every day is inventing the beauty of the future and transforming L'Oréal into a company of the future.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:32)
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**Sam Ransbotham** (3:32)
What did you learn? How will technology affect beauty? What's going to be the big change?

**Stéphane Lannuzel** (3:36)
There are two big impacts. There are the development of services for our consumers, but there are also how can we leverage technology to make the life of our employees easier and make them faster and more creative and more nimble.
Let's start first with consumers. L'Oréal has been around for more than 110 years, and we produce 7 billion physical cosmetic products every year, but we are more and more into services. And basically, tech is playing a huge part in developing beauty services. We have been working a lot on helping consumers through services and through technology to be able to find the right product for them. I take some examples. We have developed some solutions using AI and computer vision and augmented reality to be able to do virtual try-on of makeup.
Another example is skin diagnostics to make some recommendations in terms of what are your top concerns and what are the products that you should apply in your daily routine. So this is how technology is really transforming beauty. Because we want to develop a beauty that is more and more inclusive, a beauty that is more and more personalized.