Artificial intelligence is continuing to make its way into nearly every corner of the beauty business, from product development and personalization to the factories producing the products themselves.
L’Oréal is taking another step into the AI game with the second cohort of L’AcceleratOR, its innovation program created to help scale new sustainability solutions across the beauty industry and beyond.
Among the 13 startups selected is Laminar, a physical AI company developing technology designed to make manufacturing facilities more efficient by monitoring and responding to what is happening on production lines in real time.
The companies were chosen from nearly 1,000 applications spanning more than 100 countries. L’AcceleratOR is backed by €100 million over five years and operates in partnership with the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.
“We are working to unlock new frontiers in the beauty industry through pioneering solutions,” said Ezgi Barcenas, Chief Corporate Responsibility Officer at L’Oréal. “This second L’AcceleratOR cohort reflects our ambition to bring together entrepreneurial ingenuity, scientific progress and the global reach of L’Oréal to help scale breakthrough innovations.”
For Laminar, the focus is on one of manufacturing’s biggest sustainability concerns: water.
The company’s Process-Aware Autonomy technology combines sensors, machine learning and real time data to analyze what is flowing through factory pipes, determine the current state of a manufacturing process and help automate what should happen next.
Rather than relying solely on traditional preprogrammed factory automation, Laminar says its system can dynamically adjust processes with the goal of reducing water, chemicals and energy while increasing production efficiency.
“Water-intensive process manufacturing industries like health and beauty must urgently rethink how their facilities use water for production processes,” said Laminar CEO and Co-Founder Annie Lu.
According to Laminar, its technology is already deployed across hundreds of production lines on six continents, including facilities connected to major companies such as AB InBev, Coca-Cola, Danone and Unilever. The company reports an average 20 percent reduction in chemicals used, 20 percent less water per cycle and production lines operating 15 percent faster.
At Unilever’s Poznań facility, Laminar says the technology generated annual savings of more than €100,000 per line across two production lines.
The selection offers another example of how the beauty industry’s AI expansion is moving beyond consumer facing tools. While much of the conversation surrounding beauty and AI has centered on virtual try ons, personalized recommendations and digital experiences, companies are increasingly exploring how AI can operate behind the scenes in manufacturing, sustainability and supply chains.
For L’Oréal, L’AcceleratOR puts that technology directly into the sustainability conversation, with potential pilot projects examining how AI driven manufacturing could help conserve resources while improving productivity.
And as beauty companies continue searching for ways to reduce their environmental footprint, the next major AI innovation may not be something consumers see on their phones. It could be working quietly inside the factories making their favorite products.
