L'Oréal Turns to NLP to Elevate Finance Insight Delivery

L'Oréal is investing in natural language processing (NLP) to streamline its financial insight capabilities and reduce risk of error.  

The beauty company has partnered with artificial intelligence and NLP provider Yseop to leverage its iClosing enterprise automation platform, according to a press release. The technology is designed to quickly provide language and visual insights to 2,000 users around the world, enabling L'Oréal’s financial controllers to more easily identify business-driving insights. 

NLP, a component of artificial intelligence that marries computational linguistics with machine  and deep learning models, is valued for its ability to quickly and accurately understand and translate text and spoken language. This includes not only the person’s intent, but also the nuances that accompany human speech and writing. 

Consumer goods companies are investing in NLP for a number of use cases within their organizations, including chatbots for customer service. In such cases, the technology enables the bots to understand slang and anticipate follow-up queries.   

See also: L'Oréal’s New Research and Innovation Center

For L'Oréal, the NLP technology enhances a Google-powered business intelligence platform to turn the company’s internal algorithms into plain text with natural language generation (NLG). Doing so is expected to help L'Oréal’s financial controllers save time in producing reporting notes, accelerate insight delivery to business stakeholders, and reduce the risk of error in manual writing.  

L'Oréal, the No. 14 publicly owned consumer goods company, has deployed the technology across all financial divisions, zones, and countries, Yseop said, noting that they’re working together to deliver new features.

Hélène Doré, L'Oréal's global chief transformation officer for finance and legal, indicated that NLP is helping the finance teams elevate their data analytics prowess. 

“The launch of iClosing with the embedded NLG engine from Yseop and the power of Google Cloud technologies marks a turning point for the controlling community,” said  Doré in a statement. “Thanks to a unique combo of new technologies, we are accelerating and modernizing financial data analysis. Equipped with instant insights and impactful visuals and text, finance teams can jump into the next generation of data analytics.”