Here's a question worth sitting with: What happens when a Google search stops taking minutes and starts taking eleven?
That's not a typo. Asmita Dubey, L'Oréal Group's chief digital and marketing officer, says that's exactly what's happening. People used to type a question, scan some results, and move on. Now they're having a conversation with AI. Back and forth. Digging deeper. And that single shift is forcing one of the world's biggest beauty companies to rebuild how it thinks about marketing from the ground up.
I find stories like this fascinating, because they're really stories about adapting. And adapting is something I think about a lot.
Dubey's career is a good lens for this. She started in advertising in 1997, working out of India on campaigns for Suzuki and a James Bond tie-in for Ericsson. Back then, marketing meant building a brand and getting the creative right. Then computers showed up on every desk, and she — a math and statistics student at heart — got curious about what these machines could actually do. She shifted into planning and media so she could learn Excel and work with data. Then came e-commerce. Then search. Then TikTok. Then social listening.
Notice the pattern? Every few years, a new tool arrives, and the people who stay relevant are the ones who lean in and learn it instead of waiting it out.
Now Dubey's facing something bigger than any of those previous shifts: AI that's weaving itself into nearly every part of the marketing process — how companies gather insight, build content, target audiences, measure what's working, and increasingly, how shoppers decide what to buy at all.
The Journey Isn't Shrinking — It's Growing
A lot of people assumed AI would compress the consumer journey. Ask one question, get one perfect answer, done. Dubey says the opposite is happening. The journey is expanding, not collapsing.
That raises a real question for any brand: if someone's chatting with an AI for eleven minutes about sunscreen or skincare, how do you even show up in that conversation? In old-school search, you fought to rank near the top of a list. In an AI-mediated world, you need to be part of the answer itself — relevant and credible enough that the AI brings you into the conversation naturally.
L'Oréal's been testing ads inside Google's AI Overviews and working with OpenAI, Amazon, and Alibaba to figure out how its products surface inside AI-powered search. Why? Because, as Dubey puts it, more than a billion people are on these platforms asking about their lives — birthdays, travel, beauty — and that's where the conversation is happening now.
The Unglamorous Part: Pipes and Plumbing
Here's the part I really like. Dubey doesn't talk about AI like it's magic. She talks about plumbing.
At L'Oréal, nearly 20% of marketing investment is now AI-led, and machine learning already drives most of their ROI measurement. But none of that works if the underlying infrastructure — the data, the product information, the advertising accounts across platforms like Google and Meta — isn't standardized and clean. Dubey calls it learning the architecture. Skip that step, she says, and with hundreds of agencies all plugged into different tools, things go wrong fast.
There's a new discipline emerging too, called generative engine optimization, or GEO — basically, structuring your brand's authority and content so AI systems can actually understand and represent it accurately.
But here's the twist: the more technical this gets, the more the fundamentals matter. Dubey's example is simple. A universal product feed might hand an AI system 100,000 SKUs, but that doesn't tell it what your brand is actually known for. A sunscreen isn't just SPF 50 on a label — it's the story of when and why someone reaches for it.
Try It Before You Judge It
My favorite part of this whole story is what Dubey did with L'Oréal's top 20 executives. She didn't hand them a report on AI. She made them build an ad with it, start to finish. Her reasoning: you can't understand something by reading about it. You have to touch it.
That's advice I'd give anyone, at any stage of life or career. Curiosity isn't a personality trait — it's a decision you make over and over. Try the thing. See what breaks. Learn. Adjust. Try again.
AI isn't going to wait for anyone to feel ready. The real question isn't whether it's coming for marketing, beauty, travel, or whatever industry you're watching closely. It's whether you're going to experiment with it — or just read about the people who did.
Source: Fortune
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