How Top Brands Are Training Employees to Use AI Tools in 2025

How Top Beauty and Wellness Brands Are Training Employees to Use AI Tools

Artificial intelligence is no longer a buzzword reserved for tech boardrooms. Across the beauty and wellness industry, major brands are rolling up their sleeves and putting AI directly into the hands of their employees — from marketing teams crafting campaign copy to product developers analyzing consumer trends. At Glossy's annual E-Commerce Summit, leaders from some of the industry's most recognizable names, including Ulta Beauty, Sephora, Tarte, Supergoop!, SharkNinja, and Beekman 1802, gathered to share the real, on-the-ground tactics they are using to successfully implement AI tools into day-to-day workflows.

The insights revealed a clear shift: winning brands are not waiting for AI to become perfect before adopting it. Instead, they are building cultures of experimentation, equipping their teams with practical training, and establishing guardrails that protect brand integrity while unleashing creative efficiency. Here is a breakdown of the most valuable strategies being used right now, along with the broader wellness industry news making headlines alongside them.

Why AI Training Is Now a Core Business Priority

The question is no longer whether brands should use AI — it is how fast and how well they can integrate it. According to brand leaders at the summit, the biggest barrier to successful AI adoption is not the technology itself. It is the gap between what AI tools can do and what employees actually know how to ask them to do. This is why structured, ongoing training has become essential.

Brands that are winning with AI are investing in what might be called "prompt literacy" — the ability for team members to communicate clearly and effectively with AI systems to get consistently useful outputs. Rather than assuming employees will figure it out on their own, forward-thinking companies are building internal training programs, sharing prompt libraries, and creating cross-functional AI task forces to spread best practices quickly throughout their organizations.

Key Tactics Top Brands Are Using to Implement AI

1. Starting Small With High-Impact Use Cases

Brand leaders at the summit consistently emphasized the importance of identifying the highest-impact, lowest-risk areas of the business to introduce AI first. For many beauty brands, this means starting with content creation — product descriptions, social media captions, email subject line testing, and SEO blog drafts. These use cases allow teams to see immediate time savings without risking core business operations, building internal confidence and buy-in along the way.

2. Building Internal AI Champions

Several brands have found success by designating internal AI champions — employees who are enthusiastic, tech-savvy, and willing to act as in-house educators for their colleagues. These champions receive advanced training, experiment with new tools, and then distill what they learn into digestible guidance for the rest of the team. This peer-to-peer approach to training has proven far more effective than top-down mandates or generic vendor tutorials.

3. Creating Brand-Specific AI Guardrails

One of the most cited concerns around AI adoption is brand consistency. How do you ensure that AI-generated content actually sounds like your brand? The answer, according to summit attendees, lies in creating thorough brand style guides and feeding them directly into AI tools as context. Teams are building detailed prompt templates that include tone of voice guidelines, off-limits language, target audience descriptions, and competitor differentiation points — ensuring that AI outputs stay on-brand from the very first draft.

4. Encouraging a Culture of Experimentation Without Fear

Fear of making mistakes is one of the biggest blockers to AI adoption at the employee level. Leaders at the summit stressed the importance of creating psychological safety around AI experimentation. When employees feel free to test, fail, and iterate, they discover genuinely valuable AI applications that leadership might never have anticipated. Brands like Beekman 1802 and Supergoop! are fostering this culture by celebrating AI wins publicly internally and normalizing the learning curve that comes with new technology.

Major Wellness Industry News to Know

Beyond AI strategy, the wellness industry is experiencing a wave of significant developments that signal where the sector is heading next.

Ōura Drops Its Smallest Ring Yet

Wearable health technology brand Ōura has unveiled its smallest tracker ring to date, doubling down on its commitment to discreet, comfortable health monitoring. As consumer demand for non-intrusive biometric tracking continues to rise, Ōura's latest innovation positions it firmly at the intersection of wellness and wearable tech — a space growing more competitive by the month.

Unilever Invests $270 Million in a New Connecticut R&D Hub

Consumer goods giant Unilever is making a major bet on innovation with a $270 million investment in a new research and development facility in Connecticut. The move signals Unilever's long-term commitment to science-backed product development across its beauty and personal care portfolio, and reflects a broader industry trend of brands pouring resources into proprietary R&D capabilities to stay ahead of fast-moving consumer expectations.

Vladimir Putin Invests $26 Billion Into Longevity Research

In a striking move that underscores the global momentum around longevity science, reports indicate that Vladimir Putin has directed $26 billion toward longevity research initiatives. While geopolitically complex, this level of investment reflects an undeniable truth: the pursuit of longer, healthier human lives is becoming one of the defining scientific and economic priorities of the decade.

Planet Fitness Continues to Scale

Mass-market fitness brand Planet Fitness is continuing its aggressive growth strategy, expanding its footprint as demand for accessible, affordable gym memberships remains strong. The brand's scaling efforts highlight the enduring consumer appetite for physical wellness solutions that remove barriers to entry — a philosophy that continues to differentiate Planet Fitness in a crowded fitness marketplace.

The Bottom Line for Beauty and Wellness Brands

The brands pulling ahead in today's fast-moving landscape share a common thread: they treat AI not as a threat to creativity or jobs, but as a powerful amplifier for both. By investing in thoughtful employee training, building smart guardrails, and fostering cultures where experimentation is encouraged, companies like Ulta Beauty, Sephora, and Tarte are turning AI adoption from a challenge into a genuine competitive advantage. As the wellness industry continues to evolve — with new technology, record R&D investment, and shifting consumer priorities — the brands best positioned to lead are those that marry human expertise with intelligent, well-trained AI support.