How Ulta Beauty, Tarte and Beekman 1802 Execs Are Implementing AI Into Their Workflows

Beauty Industry Leaders Are Rethinking the Role of AI in Their Daily Operations

Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant concept on the beauty industry's horizon — it is already embedded in the daily workflows of some of the sector's most influential brands. At Glossy's annual E-Commerce Summit in Miami Beach, executives from Ulta Beauty, Tarte Cosmetics, and Beekman 1802 took the stage to discuss one pressing question: how are beauty and wellness business leaders actually using AI today? Their answers painted a candid, surprisingly grounded picture of where the technology stands right now and where it is headed next.

From Buzzword to Business Tool: AI Finds Its Footing in Beauty

For years, "AI" existed largely as a marketing buzzword in the beauty space — a talking point dropped into investor calls and press releases without much operational substance behind it. That is beginning to change in a meaningful way. The executives who spoke at the Glossy summit represented brands at very different scales and with very different customer bases, yet they shared a common theme: AI has moved from experimentation into genuine productivity enhancement across departments ranging from content creation to supply chain management.

The shift matters because the beauty industry operates at a uniquely fast pace. Trend cycles are compressing, consumer expectations for personalization are rising, and the cost of producing digital content continues to climb. AI tools offer a credible response to all three of these pressures simultaneously, which explains why adoption has accelerated so quickly among brand leadership teams in the past eighteen months.

Ulta Beauty: Scaling Personalization Across Millions of Customers

As one of the largest beauty retailers in North America, Ulta Beauty faces a personalization challenge that would be nearly impossible to solve without machine learning at its core. With tens of millions of active loyalty members and a product catalog spanning thousands of SKUs across every beauty category, the ability to surface the right product to the right customer at the right moment is both a massive opportunity and a genuine operational complexity.

Ulta's leadership has spoken publicly about using AI to improve recommendation engines, optimize email marketing segmentation, and refine search functionality across its digital platforms. At the Glossy summit, the conversation around AI at Ulta centered on how these tools are being used not just to drive transactions but to deepen customer relationships — understanding behavioral signals well enough to anticipate what a shopper needs before she even searches for it. The competitive advantage here is compounding: the more data the models are fed, the more accurate they become, and the more loyal customers grow in return.

Tarte Cosmetics: Accelerating Creative Output Without Losing Brand Voice

For digitally native brands like Tarte, speed of creative output is a constant competitive pressure. Tarte has built much of its brand identity on community, founder authenticity, and a distinctly playful tone of voice — assets that feel inherently human and are therefore easy to fear losing in any AI-assisted workflow.

Yet the brand's approach to AI implementation suggests that the technology and authentic storytelling are not mutually exclusive. Tarte's team has been exploring AI tools for tasks including first-draft copywriting, social media caption ideation, product description generation, and campaign concepting. The key, as the brand's leadership has emphasized, is treating AI as a collaborator rather than a replacement — a tool that handles the time-consuming early stages of creative work so that human team members can focus their energy on refinement, strategy, and the culturally nuanced decisions that still require genuine taste and judgment.

This framing is increasingly common among direct-to-consumer beauty brands navigating AI adoption. The brands that are getting the most value out of these tools are the ones that have been clear-eyed about what AI does well (speed, volume, pattern recognition) versus what humans still do better (empathy, cultural awareness, creative risk-taking).

Beekman 1802: Using AI to Preserve the Human Story at the Heart of the Brand

Beekman 1802 presents perhaps the most interesting case study of the three, precisely because its brand identity is so deeply rooted in human connection. Founded on a farm in upstate New York and built on a philosophy of kindness and community, Beekman 1802 has always differentiated itself through storytelling. The challenge for the brand's executives is how to use AI in ways that support rather than undermine that identity.

The answer, shared on stage at the Glossy summit, lies in directing AI toward operational tasks that are critical but largely invisible to the consumer — things like data analysis, inventory forecasting, and customer service routing — while keeping the brand's outward-facing voice firmly in human hands. This approach allows the team to operate more efficiently without sacrificing the warmth and authenticity that their customer base has come to expect and trust.

Key Takeaways for Beauty Brands Navigating AI Adoption

The conversations at the Glossy E-Commerce Summit offered several lessons that apply broadly across the beauty and wellness industry:

• Start with specific use cases, not general ambitions. The brands seeing real results from AI are not trying to automate everything at once. They are identifying the highest-friction, highest-volume tasks in their workflows and targeting those first.
• Preserve brand voice intentionally. AI-generated content requires active editorial oversight. The brands that do this well treat AI output as a first draft, not a final product.
• Use data as a competitive moat. The more proprietary customer data a brand has, the more valuable its AI tools become over time. First-party data strategy and AI strategy are increasingly inseparable.
• Bring your team along. Executive adoption of AI tools means little without organization-wide literacy. The brands making the most progress are investing in training and building cultures that treat experimentation as a positive norm rather than a threat.

The Road Ahead: AI as a Standard Operating Tool in Beauty

What makes the Glossy summit panel particularly valuable is not that the executives shared revolutionary secrets, but that they confirmed something more important: AI is working in practical, measurable ways for real beauty businesses right now. The gap between brands that have meaningfully integrated AI and those that have not is already visible in operational efficiency metrics, content output velocity, and customer engagement rates.

For beauty founders, marketing leaders, and e-commerce teams still sitting on the sidelines, the message from Ulta Beauty, Tarte, and Beekman 1802 is clear: the question is no longer whether to implement AI, but how to do so in a way that reflects and reinforces what makes your brand distinctly yours. The technology is available. The competitive pressure is building. The brands that figure out this balance now are the ones that will be best positioned as AI capabilities continue to evolve rapidly throughout the rest of the decade.