Beauty Giants Race to Own the AI Shopping Moment

The next time a customer wants a foundation shade, she might not open a search engine. She’ll ask an AI.

Sephora launched an app inside ChatGPT. Fenty Beauty built an artificial intelligence adviser on WhatsApp. Ulta Beauty rolled out agentic commerce across Google’s AI surfaces. Three platforms, three brands, one problem: Purchase intent is moving inside AI interfaces, and whoever controls that moment controls the sale.

From Search to Conversation

The mechanics differ by platform, but the logic is the same. Meet the customer where she already is.

Sephora launched its app in ChatGPT, piloting in the United States, with customers able to prompt beauty advice in the chat and receive curated recommendations based on preferences from their Beauty Insider account. Payments and checkout directly within the app are planned for future updates. Sephora’s global community counts more than 80 million active members, as noted by the company. That membership data is what makes the personalization viable. The model knows the customer before she types the first word.

Fenty Beauty launched “Rose Amber,” an AI-powered beauty adviser built for WhatsApp, marking its first formal partnership with the platform in the U.S., reported by Glossy. Users can ask questions about skin concerns, take quizzes and explore products across Fenty Beauty, Fenty Skin and Fenty Hair. The assistant responds with product suggestions alongside creator videos and customer reviews.

The WhatsApp channel carries commercial weight beyond the U.S. In Brazil, more than 20% of L’Oréal’s direct-to-consumer online sales come through conversational commerce on WhatsApp, and the company has found the platform converts abandoned carts at six times the rate of email, according to Glossy. Fenty’s longer-term ambition includes in-app purchases and global expansion.

Agentic Commerce Enters the Beauty Aisle

Ulta Beauty’s move operates at a different layer. Rather than building inside a single AI product, the retailer is making its assortment shoppable across Google’s AI surfaces.

Ulta Beauty is rolling out agentic commerce within AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, where shoppers can receive product recommendations, compare options and complete streamlined checkout for eligible purchases directly within Google’s conversational interfaces. The integration uses Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol, an open standard for agentic commerce.

On its own digital properties, Ulta Beauty is launching Ulta AI, a new shopping assistant built on Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience, drawing on insights from its 46 million-plus members to provide personalized guidance across its digital assortment, the company said.

The architecture matters. Ulta isn’t just placing products inside a chat window. It’s connecting its catalog, its loyalty data and its checkout infrastructure to a system that meets a shopper at the exact moment she expresses intent. That moment now happens inside Google Search as often as it happens on a retailer’s own site.

Where Commerce Infrastructure Is Heading

The three moves point in the same direction. The discovery layer is shifting from owned retail surfaces to third-party AI interfaces. Brands and retailers that connect their inventory, loyalty programs and checkout to those interfaces control the transaction. Those that don’t cede the moment to whoever does.

WhatsApp already handles more than 1 billion active threads between users and businesses daily across Meta’s messaging platforms, with nearly 80% of people globally messaging a business at least once a week, according to a WhatsApp spokesperson cited by Glossy. Beauty is one of the first categories to build commerce infrastructure on top of that volume.

The question facing retail executives isn’t whether AI becomes a purchase channel. It already is. The question is whether their catalog, their data and their checkout are connected to it before a competitor’s are.

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