Asmita Dubey, L'Oréal Group's Chief Digital and Marketing Officer, is overseeing a restructuring of the company's marketing operations to keep pace with how AI is changing the way consumers search and shop. Dubey began her advertising career in 1997 in India, working on campaigns for brands including Suzuki and Ericsson, and brought a background in mathematics and statistics into increasingly data-driven marketing roles across e-commerce, search and social platforms before reaching her current position.
Nearly a fifth of marketing is already AI-led
Under Dubey, L'Oréal now brings data, IT and marketing teams together to reassess how its organizational processes and systems work, rather than treating AI as a bolt-on to existing marketing structures. Close to 20% of the company's marketing investment is now AI-led, with machine learning increasingly shaping how return on investment gets measured. Practically, that's meant standardizing product data across platforms like Google and Meta, adopting what the company calls "generative engine optimization" to structure content so AI systems can understand it, and folding beauty research into an internal conversational intelligence platform. Generative AI is also playing a larger role in producing images, text and video content directly.
Search is getting longer, not shorter
One of the more counterintuitive shifts Dubey points to is that AI hasn't shrunk consumer search behavior, it's expanded it. Users now spend around 11 minutes on AI-assisted searches, compared with just minutes on a traditional search query, which raises the bar for how credible and relevant content needs to be to hold attention that long. "Marketing is about the consumer. The reason we are talking about AI is because more than a billion consumers are on it," Dubey has said, framing the overhaul less as a technology bet and more as a response to where its customers already are.