According to Wayne Liu, president and chief growth officer of Perfect Corporation, the future of beauty lies in agentic artificial intelligence, with personalized AI created in-house by brands.
Speaking at WWD Beauty Inc’s LA Beauty conference, Liu said the company is “leveraging AI” to help brands from big names to small brands digitally transform. While most companies are focusing on generative AI as a second wave, Liu said agent AI is the next frontier in the beauty field.
“Agentic AI is important for the beauty industry because we need to feel the world,” he explained. “You need to be able to learn about your customers and act on them.”
Brands now have access to customer and preference data, as well as product ingredients and technology. All this has to be uploaded to a platform like ChatGPT to make it smarter, but this takes away the sovereignty of the AI.
“If you can no longer provide the power, water, and land operations of this large data center, that’s why smaller on-site models, ideally running on PCs, will be the trend going forward,” Liu said. “AI needs to have intelligence and act on behalf of the customer. In beauty, you need vertical data to train your own beauty agents specifically for your brand, using your social media feeds, all your posts, and customer survey data.”
He also said that when creating a beauty AI agent for a brand, it needs a persona to act as a beauty advisor or expert to answer customer questions.
“The industry is on the cutting edge of agentic AI. There’s a lot to come, and there’s a lot of uncertainty, but there’s also a lot of opportunity. What will define the winning brands over the next decade? It really comes down to how they strategize their intelligence. Not just artificial intelligence, but a combination of artificial intelligence and human intelligence,” Liu concluded.
