Estée Lauder, Henkel, Ultimate Products and Others Invest in AI Optimizations
Artificial intelligence has a presence in most consumer goods' tech stacks, but the technology has wide use cases and each enterprise takes a different approach to integration. This past month, companies such as Estée Lauder, Ultimate Products, Arc’teryx, Schreiber Foods and Henkel made AI investments that will take manual pressure off their organizations and expedite workflows through automation.
See how each of these consumer goods companies approached AI investment and what it means for the industry.
Estée Lauder
Estée Lauder Cos. is leveraging generative engine optimization (GEO) and enterprise-wide AI marketing. Through a strategic global partnership with AI marketing platform Profound, the beauty company aims to gain a unified view of how its entire portfolio is represented on major AI search platforms such as ChatGPT and Gemini. By using agentic tools to systematically audit and optimize product description pages, blogs and video channels, Estée Lauder will refine its product information, ingredients and claims to ensure large language models can easily understand and accurately surface its products to potential buyers.
This push marks a major milestone in the company’s "One Operating" ecosystem, which embeds enterprise-wide AI to actively anticipate shifting consumer behaviors rather than simply reacting to them. As Aude Gandon, global chief digital and marketing officer, noted, the way consumers discover beauty products is being rewritten in real time.
Ultimate Products
Ultimate Products, a U.K.-based company behind heritage homeware brands like Salter and Beldray, was facing severe product information bottlenecks as it scaled over 6,500 parent SKUs and 20,000 variants across nine countries. Operating with data fragmented across more than 30 spreadsheets, shared drives and email chains, teams were bogged down by version-checking, duplicate efforts and manual administration. To solve this operational strain and support its international growth, the company partnered with Salsify to centralize its product information management and lay the groundwork for future AI-led capabilities.
By treating the adoption as a full business transformation rather than a simple software update, Ultimate Products established nearly 700 workflows covering everything from SKU allocation to content approvals. The company onboarded 200 employees within a year and integrated AI to generate alt text, draft copy and perform translations while maintaining human oversight where judgment was critical. This unified foundation has provided a scalable operating model for global expansion, already yielding an 11% year-over-year increase in Amazon conversion rates and driving an estimated $2.9 million in incremental sales.
Arc’teryx
Arc’teryx, a high-performance Canadian outerwear and equipment brand, is overhauling its digital planning processes to drive data-led, consumer-centric operations as it scales across direct-to-consumer and wholesale channels globally. Partnering with enterprise AI company o9, Arc’teryx is implementing end-to-end planning capabilities spanning merchandise financing, demand forecasting, store allocation and replenishment, and supply chain management. This technological upgrade is designed to streamline inventory management and align cross-business decisions, enabling the brand to react dynamically to shifts in consumer demand across its more than 160 branded stores and 2,400 global retail locations.
For Arc’teryx, precision and efficiency are paramount to sustaining growth without compromising retail and consumer expectations. As Matt Ferrari, SVP of supply chain, emphasized, delivering the right product to the right place at the right time is fundamental to the brand’s operational strategy. By integrating these advanced planning tools, Arc’teryx establishes a disciplined, scalable foundation that connects integrated business processes, ensuring the company maintains its high standards of responsiveness and product placement as its global footprint expands.
Schreiber Foods
Global dairy and cheese producer Schreiber Foods is undertaking a major digital transformation, deploying agentic AI capabilities across more than 40 locations on five continents to power sustainable growth and innovation. Through a multiyear partnership with software engineering firm Ascendion, the company is modernizing its global IT capability centers and ERP environment to enhance decision-making, improve plant network traceability, and unify collaboration for over 10,000 employee-partners worldwide. By offloading repetitive, high-volume technical tasks to AI agents, Schreiber aims to boost operational agility while capturing cost efficiencies across its international network.
The initiative centers on empowering employees rather than replacing them, allowing engineers and analysts to shift their focus from manual maintenance to creative problem-solving and customer-centric innovation. As President Trevor Farrell and CIO Sri Kantamneni noted, equipping teams with AI-native tools elevates internal service standards and accelerates the company's growth trajectory. By automating routine processes, Schreiber Foods is creating a more responsive, scalable foundation to serve its global network of manufacturers, retailers and restaurants.
Henkel
Henkel, the consumer goods manufacturer behind brands like Loctite and Pritt, is transforming its R&D operations by deploying "Ask Albert," an agentic chemistry-native AI model developed by Albert Invent Corp. By combining Henkel's historical scientific data with content from CAS (a division of the American Chemical Society), the tool acts as a custom, chemistry-trained retrieval model that automates complex tasks such as formulation design and raw material sourcing. Scientists can query the system to analyze past experiments and immediately jump to linked formulation worksheets or inventory records, breaking down silos across global teams.
The company has reported breakthroughs in scientific discovery while maintaining strict enterprise-grade security. More than half of the formulations surfaced by the system originate from outside the scientists' own projects, and nearly 80% of recommended raw materials are entirely new to the receiving researchers — leading over 90% of Henkel’s chemists to adopt the tool regularly. As Houda El-Haddad, head of digital and innovation solutions, noted, solving the challenge of "knowing what you already know" unlocks tremendous latent value. Backed by rigorous data privacy measures, including zero-data retention and step-by-step reasoning audit trails, Ask Albert serves as a cornerstone for Henkel’s broader push toward centralized, AI-enabled innovation.
What This Means for the Industry
These investments signal a shift from generative applications to agentic execution.
Many companies are moving past basic content generation toward autonomous, task-specific agentic AI models. Instead of simply answering questions, these models execute complex logic, such as auditing product listings across platforms in Estée Lauder's application, running automated tech workflows for Schreiber Foods or cross-referencing global chemical formulas at Henkel.
The Estée Lauder and Arc’teryx use cases also show how companies are targeting the two ends of the modern value chain, optimizing how products are discovered and improving execution for how they are delivered.
In most of these instances, we are seeing a move away from manual, low-value work, using AI to free up time and efforts for employees so they can focus on building relationships, guiding decision-making and expediting innovation.
At the core, however, is clean data. These organizations recognize that advanced AI is useless without clean, unified data. Whether consolidating more than 30 disparate spreadsheets into a single platform in Ultimate Products' case, streamlining research history at Henkel or standardizing global ERP environments for Schreiber Foods, data governance is treated as the prerequisite for AI scalability.
