Global search giant Google recently opened its Vertex AI platform for public use, so that any beauty brand industrious enough to take advantage of it can create innovative digital tools for its customers. L’Oreal’s innovative diagnostic tool already uses the learning technology to offer personalised skincare advice. “ModiFace’s skin diagnostic is trained on thousands of images from L’Oréal’s Research & Innovation, the company’s dedicated research arm. Bringing together L’Oréal’s scientific research combined with ModiFace’s AI algorithm, this service allows people to obtain a highly precise tailor-made skincare routine.” Professional Beauty spoke to the team at Google to find out just how a beauty business could best apply this tech. In a world where tech-led and digital-first beauty is becoming the norm, brands can gain a competitive edge learning about all the available tech out there and how it applies to them.
PB: How does Google see beauty brands and businesses being able to use this technology in their marketing, product offering, etc?
“Vertex AI allows beauty brands to speed up the deployment and maintenance of AI models, making it easier for brands to use AI and machine learning to develop intelligent features without having to build these tools from scratch. For beauty brands, AI plays a significant role in the capabilities of augmented reality where it’s used to make digital overlays, like different hair colours or shades of lipstick, to appear and respond more realistically.
A key advantage of Vertex AI for beauty brands is the ability to improve product offerings, whether that’s recommendations on treating clinical skin concerns or the ability for customers to better test products virtually when shopping online.”
PB: What services is Google offering to help onboard businesses or help them understand/use it?
“Google Cloud offers training courses to help businesses maximise the technology, as well as written resources on our website. Customers can also work closely with our sales teams to ensure they have a smooth onboarding.”
PB: How can salons and spas use it? How can skincare brands use it?
“Skincare brands can use this tool to improve customer experience by building modern virtual tools to help customers with clinical concerns, in near real time. By harnessing the power of AI, customers can upload an image of their face to a skincare brand website and the technology will examine the facial imagery to help identify possible skin concerns that can be addressed with products that the brand carries.
For example, our customer ModiFace’s skin diagnostic tool is trained using thousands of images from L’Oréal’s Research & Innovation, the company’s dedicated research arm. Bringing together L’Oréal’s scientific research combined with ModiFace’s AI algorithm, this service allows people to obtain a precise, tailor-made skincare routine – from their screen!
For customers in the beauty industry, they can explore using Vertex AI to build experiences for their customers to try new hairstyles or colours before commiting, enhancing their experience.”
PB: Are there ways for small businesses to use it well or do you need a lot of in-house tech know-how?
“Vertex AI requires 80 percent fewer lines of code to train a model versus competitive platforms. This means that data scientists and ML engineers across all levels of expertise can implement ML operations to efficiently build and manage ML projects throughout the entire development lifecycle.
It’s important that small businesses are able to offer modernised capabilities like this to replicate in-store shopping experiences, especially in a time of chronic COVID disruption and as consumers continue to embrace ecommerce.”
PB: What are the full extent of the capabilities here? What can they do? For example, Routinely skincare launched and its app will learn over time to help offer customised skincare routines daily to its customers.
“The potential applications of Vertex AI are extensive. For example, ModiFace, a part of L’Oreal, creates new services for consumers to try beauty products such as hair colour, makeup and nail colour, virtually in real-time. ModiFace uses the Vertex AI model to train its new services, allowing it to improve the capabilities of its platform as it gathers more data points.
In an age of ecommerce, the ability of beauty brands to offer accurate virtual try-on solutions is critical. People want the experiences they were having in-store, in their home. Vertex AI gives brands the opportunity to leverage data they already have in order to improve these services and enhance their offering to customers.”
Learn more about Google Vertex AI here.
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