L'Oréal is to deploy generative artificial intelligence (generative AI/GenAI) from IBM to make its products more sustainable. The company wants to use the technology to gain new insights from data on the composition of cosmetic products. The aim is to increase the use of sustainable raw materials and reduce both energy consumption and waste production.
As part of the project, IBM and L'Oréal are developing a customised AI model to support L'Oréal's research and innovation teams. To develop the AI model, the parties will combine L'Oréal's knowledge of cosmetic products with IBM's AI technologies.
Using sustainable raw materials
L'Oréal wants to use the technology to explore sustainable raw materials when developing consumer products. The company thus aims to reduce and minimise the impact of its products on the earth. Through the project, the cosmetics company aims to support its goal of sourcing most product formulations based on bio-based materials and/or the circular economy by 2030.
The AI model will be trained with a large number of formulations and data, with the aim of speeding up various tasks for L'Oréal researchers. These include formulating new products, reformulating existing ones and optimising production on a larger scale. By better understanding the behaviour of renewable ingredients in cosmetic formulations, L'Oréal aims to develop more sustainable product lines.
Foundation model
The model L'Oréal will use is a so-called foundation model. Foundation models are AI models that are trained on a wide range of unlabelled data and can perform different tasks by applying information, knowledge and skills it gains during training to new applications.
Among other things, this makes a foundation model versatile as it learns general patterns, concepts and relationships that are not limited to a single domain or task. A foundation model can apply its knowledge to a variety of applications.
Author: Wouter Hoeffnagel
Image: Dennis Von Dutch via Pixabay
