The Estée Lauder Companies and Microsoft Copilot Studio transform intelligence

With nearly 25 brands under the ELC umbrella, the company generates a high volume of insights about product development and marketing. To remain competitive, it needed a solution to help find insights faster and inform consumer-centric decisions.

ELC worked with Microsoft to build an AI agent, ConsumerIQ, with Copilot Studio. ConsumerIQ is underpinned by Azure OpenAI Service to analyze documents, identify trends, and provide strategic recommendations.

By centralizing information and applying a sophisticated AI tool, ELC has reduced the time required to gather data from weeks to minutes. This allows product developers and marketers to get to market faster and respond quickly to trend shifts.

“How does an 80-year-old company compete with new, agile startups?” asks Raheel Khan, Senior Vice President, Foresight and Growth Intelligence at The Estée Lauder Companies (ELC). “By using our intelligence.”

With nearly 25 brands operating across 150 countries, ELC generates an immense amount of consumer, market, and industry information to support product innovation, marketing, and sales. This vast amount of data, spread across the company in different formats – PDFs, PowerPoints, spreadsheets – is dense with meaningful insights that employees can use to create products and campaigns that meet consumer needs.

“By synthesizing and providing a simple way to access information from multiple sources, we can quickly identify data-backed insights to inform consumer-centric decisions,” says Jennifer Lee, Director, Strategic Initiatives and Predictive Analytics at ELC.

In a global company with many brands, housing data in one centralized location helps bring visibility to ELC’s vast treasure trove of data. “The sheer scale of our consumer insights and complexity of our matrixed organization makes it unrealistic for any team to know everything that’s available, which can result in duplicative studies and delays in activating with our consumers,” Lee continues.

It was imperative that ELC harness its decades of intelligence, which is an industry advantage. In a TikTok world where beauty trends shift with a tap, being able to get product to market quickly is essential for staying competitive.

“Microsoft is connecting the dots across Copilot Studio solutions and helping us build an agentic world for The Estée Lauder Companies.”

Raheel Khan, SVP, Enterprise Marketing, The Estée Lauder Companies

Instant insights, validated and secure

To address this challenge, ELC created ConsumerIQ, an agent built in Microsoft Copilot Studio. ConsumerIQ is a dynamic intelligence hub underpinned by Azure OpenAI Service, with a chat interface using natural language to provide actionable intelligence. “We chose Copilot Studio because it’s tied into our Azure environment, giving us the seamless integration with our data that we needed,” notes Jayesh Mehta, VP, Brand Technology Leader at ELC.

To pull it all together, the team first centralized their information in one place. Then, with Azure OpenAI, the platform was taught to read research like charts, graphs, and images. Using generative AI, ConsumerIQ analyzes the documents to identify trends, connecting disparate data sources and providing strategic recommendations. It brings together decades of ELC’s knowledge along with current trends and studies to provide high quality, data-driven insights.

Now a product marketer at Origins, Estée Lauder, or any of the other ELC brands can query ConsumerIQ, “What are the trends in night cream?” for example. They’ll immediately receive an insight that includes citations so they can track down the original source for validation or more specific information.

“Since we deployed our Copilot agent, teams can now elevate their skill sets and focus on creating compelling marketing strategies and innovative products.”

Jennifer Lee, Strategic Initiatives and Predictive Analytics, The Estée Lauder Companies

Intelligence at speed

By centralizing insights and applying a user-friendly interface, ELC has reduced the time required to gather data from weeks to minutes. ConsumerIQ allows employees to quickly identify consumer insights exactly when they need them – empowering them to make data-backed decisions and move faster in the ever-evolving beauty industry.

Automating tedious data-gathering tasks with ConsumerIQ frees up teams to focus on strategic initiatives. “Since we deployed our Copilot agent, teams can now elevate their skill sets and focus on creating compelling marketing strategies and innovative products,” says Lee.

“Having the right information at our fingertips through our Copilot agent gives us the speed and competitive edge we need to go up against small, nimble newcomers,” explains Mehta.

Beauty reimagined

Looking ahead, ELC plans to expand ConsumerIQ’s capabilities, integrating additional data sources and scaling its use across all brands and functions. “The low-code/no-code capabilities of Copilot Studio allowed us to build a scalable solution that can be expanded to other use cases in the business, like supply chain and manufacturing,” says Shilpa Niranjan, Director, IT Business Partner at ELC. “Microsoft is connecting the dots across Copilot Studio solutions,” notes Khan, “and helping us build an agentic world for ELC.”

“ConsumerIQ is helping us put generations of experience to work for everyone, ensuring we stay competitive in a fast-changing world,” concludes Khan. “Intelligence is a beautiful thing.”

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Shilpa Niranjan, Director, IT Business Partner at ELC, shares her perspective on creating Copilot agents

When I got the chance to work on the Copilot Studio project, I jumped at it. I really wanted to go deeper into AI as an important step for my career, and also because I’m fascinated by AI. This was a perfect opportunity to step outside my current role in global supply chain and dive into something completely different—in the marketing domain. It was a stretch assignment, but that’s what made it so exciting.

The project was all about building ConsumerIQ, a generative AI tool that lets global marketing, insights and other brand teams ask questions like “What is the mascara trend with daily exercisers?” and instantly get summarized, actionable answers. No more digging through piles of documents or spending hours summarizing data. The architecture behind it is very complex, with Azure OpenAI Service and Azure Functions apps, but the idea was simple: speed to information.

What really got me hooked was the chance to build my own AI agent. Using Copilot Studio, I created a supply chain agent that pulls answers from specific documents I have access to. Training it felt surprisingly natural—like teaching a human assistant. This kind of intuitive AI agent builder tool can be scaled to broader business users, for domain specific or generic use cases.

Because of the strong culture around upskilling at ELC, I’ve had this amazing chance to learn about implementing generative AI products using industry best practices. I’m excited to see how tools like Copilot Studio can keep empowering people to work smarter, not harder.