Asmita Dubey on AI, Fragmentation, and the Future of Marketing

0:00The last decade of the marketeer's dilemma, there's one word that can sum it up and that word is fragmentation. Because it is the fragmentation which starts to create a lot of those questions to say, are we doing it right or wrong? And AI will only increase that.

0:21Here's a little secret. When I asked leaders across the industry and within Google, which company is truly cracking the code on modern marketing, one name comes up more than any other, L 'Oreal. Joining me today is Azmita Dubey, the Chief Digital Marketing Officer at L 'Oreal Group. Azmita oversees the digital transformation for the world's largest beauty business, navigating a portfolio of iconic brands and over 90 ,000 employees. Her leadership is defined by a simple but powerful philosophy. Marketing must flex two muscles at once, math and magic. It's the constant balance of creativity and technology, short-term performance and long-term brand building that matters.

1:06Today, we're diving into how L 'Oreal is operationalizing AI at enterprise scale, building from a decade of digital transformation and now into a new era of AI augmented marketing. If you want to be at the frontier of this moment, this is your blueprint. Here's my conversation with Azmita.

1:29It seems like you're a true global citizen. You've, you know, worked in China, family all over the world, you were telling me, based in Paris, travel all over the world. What does that feel like? How does being a global citizen impact your role and what you're doing day to day? It shapes you. It shapes who you are. Part of that means, I mean, it's very cliched, but you surprise yourself on how you learn to perceive the world and understand it a little bit more. Okay. Well, I was reading about some of your background and beyond being so truly global, your parents were teachers. It just seems to me that being a CMO today requires you to be pretty much in constant learning mode and having teachers as parents might have been a good training ground for your career here.

2:24I mean, you see, we all are shaped by our backgrounds. You know, we are who we grew up with, the people who were around us, our siblings, our parents, our friends, our schooling, our country. So I would say, yes, it's definitely shaped who I am. My father was a professor and a vice chancellor. My mom was a teacher. My sister is a teacher. My grandfather was a teacher. So, yes, we come from a family of teachers. I would say there are two or three things I realize now that I picked up, you know, because when you're growing up, you don't really consciously pick up things. One was simple living and high thinking.

3:06I think this ability to need very little in life, but still be able to think about a very broad view and a very ambitious view. I learned that from my father, I would say. The second one, of course, what you're saying, learning is part of teacher's life, you know, because we grew up in a house that was full of books all the time. He was writing, he was losing his manuscripts and everybody was going around looking for them. So there is a kind of, that's the norm, you know, that becomes the norm that you're learning something all the time or you're expressing something all the time. third, I would say that even another thing, I mean, it's leadership by influence, because teachers decide how children become or how young adults become, and they influence how they think, how they feel, how they, you know, perceive the world.

4:08And I feel that the idea of leadership by influence is also something I feel is a strong one when you're a teacher and or you see teachers around you. So this is a really interesting idea. So I just want to pull on this a little further. I mean, you're operating inside of L 'Oreal, one of the largest, most successful companies in the world. It has to be and is indeed matrix all over the place, different countries, different levels. And just talk about that influencing. You must spend your entire day influencing. And this is a core role for any executive, whatever the function you're in, right?

4:41Yeah, I think in today's context of large organizations or even small ones, influence is part and parcel of how we work and how we collaborate and how we convince people. So for us, we are a very large organization. We are a 115-year-old organization. We have about 90 ,000 people. A lot of them are very good marketeers. You know, so if you look at the function, which is broadly marketing, it is absolutely in a matrix, a matrix which is multidivision, division and brands, but also global zone and local. And moreover, we have marketeers who are very upstream, who are into creation. So they are developing products and crafting brands.

5:33And that's their key specialization. They understand other things too. there are operational marketeers who are in the countries and those marketeers are activating all the big ideas, you know, and making the brands in the country. And as what we call the chief digital and marketing function is about best consumer engagement with beauty and everything that is changing in that consumer journey and consumer engagement and to bring that to everybody. So it's a fascinating job because everything is changing all the time in today's world. And therefore together, I think all these populations, all of us work together.

6:12And what we say is we augment marketing. And when we say we augment marketing, we are very clear that we want to do it. We want to flex the dual muscle. We want to do it with both creativity and technology. And also while we embrace technology, we want to keep everything that is creative in the DNA of our brands and brand marketeers. And therefore we call this math and magic. So I'm going to pick up on that in just a second. but let's just think about you've been in your role you've been at l 'oreal a very long time right like uh 20 years or yeah so just tell me in terms of influence who were your major stakeholders who are you having to influence and engage with 10 years ago that is different today if you look at the whole ecosystem you know of marketing you know all the marketeers you know the brand marketers, the influencing marketing people, the e-commerce marketing, the data-driven marketing, and all that ecosystem of marketers internally who we work with.

7:16And therefore, everything that is changing in marketing is coming to that group of people. That's a big group, you know? And then there is the leadership. Everything starts with the leadership, even something like transformative AI, it's a C-level initiative. So if the leadership is aligned, then a lot of the other kind of pieces fall in place. We also influence our marketing services ecosystem and work. We have great partnerships. Our Google partnership is in the next decade today. We've already had 10 years of relationship and we are starting the 11th year. We have very deep and profound holding agency relationships.

7:59We have relationships with tech partners like Salesforce or Adobe, you know, and then we have an open innovation ecosystem. So we are working with the open innovation ecosystem because so many new products are coming, whether it was advocacy and influence or AI application layers or using data better. So if you say, who are we influencing today? We are influencing all these people. And of course, the number of people that we are working with and collaborating with and therefore influencing each other, learning from each other is growing a lot. So it seemed like as a CMO today versus 10 years ago, it's just a whole different suite of people who you actually have to connect with.

8:43So in my experience, I joined Google in 2011, and we're a product and engineering-led company. But the reality is that there wasn't that much interaction between marketing and product in terms of building solutions for marketers at that time. and over the years and to where we are today, where the connection between our marketing teams and our engineering teams to build the software layers, the AI technologies into what we're doing is completely transformed. We're now hand in glove, which is incredibly exciting for me because I get to work with some of the best engineers in the world. And I assume that's happening with you as well.

9:21Your CTO, your CIO, all the data, just the amount of compute we're using is part of what we have to talk about. You're so right. And that is absolutely true because, you know, the whole transformation of digital started more than a decade ago for us. And it was in 2018 that we started championing beauty tech. And when we say beauty tech, it is this whole new relationship with our consumers, starting with beauty services, which can be offline devices or online, starting with the consumer journey, using more data and AI in it. And that means that that ecosystem also extends to functions which are, you know, our CTO, CIO, our head of data, and now our head of AI.

10:06And absolutely. So let me start. For you personally, individually, how have you adapted, changed, learned, grown, kept ahead? You've been around a long time, being very, very successful. What have you done to help stay ahead, grow and learn through these unbelievable transformation times? I don't think it's just about me in this case. I work at L 'Oreal and people in L 'Oreal work for a very long time in this company. And we have a culture which is about seizing what is starting, you know, which means that we are constantly looking at what is coming new for us. We have a culture, we are shaping the future of beauty with science, technology, creativity.

10:50We are people who we say that we are both poets and peasants. So we can be very visionary in terms of where the future is coming. But then we, you know, roll our sleeves and we are into the executional excellence. And when you do all of that and with everything, the rapid changes that we see in the beauty consumer, we are very, very entrepreneurial as a culture. And we are very passionate people. And we kind of feed each other with that. So how do you stoke that entrepreneurialism? Because you're doing something right, right? doing a lot of things right clearly but as part of the c-suite your job is to get your five ten thousand people whoever are really working for you to be take keep that entrepreneurial spirit alive so so what are some of the things what are the one or two ideas or notions that really help drive that behavior innovation is in the dna of our country company there has been a massive focus on the last uh few years and even now on on skills we are a company who is becoming more and more about skills.

11:53We have taken the whole organization and kind of broken it down into more than 500 different skills. Within marketing digital, you know, there's about 50 to 70 skills that we say, okay, good at brand building, on idea generation, on CRM, on media, on advocacy and influence. And then what we do is we upskill from the skill, you know? So in your adjacencies, we upskill like the thousands and thousands of marketeers with what we call augmented marketing and communications university every year. Then with that upskilling, a whole population starts to get to know it. And the proof of that upskilling comes in the way we manage mobility and change for the people.

12:40So people are constantly moving from one kind of job to another kind of job, and therefore they're learning on the job as well. So that really works for our system, I would say. And with that upskilling, there is also, as so many topics are new, while we are in a matrix, and you were talking about like how the matrix works. So yes, there is a multi-division, division. There are a lot of brands. We have 40 global brands are there. Yes, we are also, we are sitting in Paris, but there is the zones, the Europe zone, the North America zone and all, there are the countries and all the work is happening there.

13:16And what we are doing is we're taking particular skills and creating communities of those skills. So people who understand advocacy and influence and are the best influencer marketeers of our company, they come together every month and they share with each other what happened in Brazil. And, you know, so we just had a Garnier product, which did very, very well with a kind of a way of doing advocacy that we are calling Mass for Kessie because we are creating a lot of peer-to-peer word of mouth between people. So that gets discussed in all those forums and everybody goes, what did you do? And how did you do it?

13:53What part of it can we copy? So there is the upskilling and then the community management. And with all of that, there's a constant learning mechanism within the company. So that's super fascinating. And this is, I love these conversations because people say we have an innovative culture, but it's like there is always a system. There is always a way of working. This is what I think it means to be at the frontier of marketing. You build the foundations, you build the programs. As a leader, you have to invest in bringing your teams along. And when you create the pathway, they then will fill it. And actually things will go.

14:30So that sounds like a real good secret sauce that organizations really need to invest. You said 50 to 70 skills with the marketing, constantly being updated, adapted and pushed? Being adapted, but also kind of formalize the thing that how many skills do I have? So we have apps called Edge where you can go and test yourself and then say, I want an adjacent skill, therefore I'm going to build two more. And therefore that upskill and reskill and therefore move. So yeah, it's absolutely it is a system. Just to give you an idea, when we talk about AI, and a lot of companies are doing that, But what is the internal L 'Oreal GPT?

15:09More than 70 ,000 people are upskilled on that. When we talk about augmented marketing and communications university, I think in 2025, which was whole of last year, almost 30 ,000 people were upskilled, you know, on programs within that. It's remarkable and probably explains why people are sticking around because they're continuously growing and learning. I want to go back a few years. I was looking at the numbers on L 'Oreal, and back in 2015, 2016, somewhere around there, about 5 % of L 'Oreal sales were direct online. Today, it's somewhere over 30%, 31%, 32%. You don't have to say the exact number, of course, but you have digitally transformed.

15:58Most companies say they have and haven't, and you have. And I'd just love to hear from you about what were the decisions, the crossroads, the pillars, what enabled this transformation to where we are today from 10 years ago? You know, there was the support of the whole organization, and there was a strategy to do that. There was this idea of we were so focused on the fact that the consumer engagement models are changing, And the channel mix is changing. And do we understand it very, very well? Are the playbooks right? So that becomes the strategic intent, the understanding of it, the going deep into the numbers, the looking at our business all the time, actually making playbooks.

16:46You know, at some point we go like we have too many playbooks, but sitting down, writing it, formalizing it as to what is working, because we understand that the consumer engagement models are changing. We are a beauty company. It is about creating demand and desire for beauty with the offers that we have, engaging with our consumers in the right way. And if the consumer is changing their behavior, to be with that behavior. And then with our customers, when it comes, the channel mix has shifted so much over the last decade. Who are the players that are emerging? Do we have the best understanding of those players?

17:25What do we know? How can we change? What can we learn? So there is these two which were changing and to be part with that change all the time to understand it very well. But once you understand it and you strategize it, still we need at speed the shift in operating models, right? To give you one example, if you look at the creator economy, the creator economy has really been growing over the last five years. If you look at television, people say on one hand, television is dead. On the other hand, it's the streaming, the digital TV, which is growing, you know, so much. If you look at commerce, commerce to e-commerce to O plus O is changing.

18:03So all these changes also need a changing operating model on our side. Operating model could mean organizations, but operating models also mean you might need to create a factory of all our websites so that it is put together. It also means creating a big digital asset management tool, which now has more than 5 million assets. It means having content factories, content operating models are shifting. We need data ecosystems in place. We have been working a lot with Google. We were the first ones to roll out Google Analytics 4 on scale. We are using a lot of data and dashboarding with you to understand that what we are doing is right or not.

18:43We are doing market mix modeling with you. So all those operating models are also shifting with it. Third, I would say is the operating models are within our teams, but also with our partners operating. Not just operating models, but the nature of the partnership. Now, you know, the master service agreements with our agencies, the joint business plans with our platforms where we have joint business plans with Google, but also with Meta, TikTok, Amazon, with all of those in place. there is a focus on measurement, measurement, which is performance metrics, you know, that, oh, is it working? What was the return ROAS?

19:22What was the CPM? What were the impressions? What was the share of influence? What is competitive? But also brand metrics, because in the end, we are doing all of this to create the relationship between consumers and brands. So is top of mind awareness, our brand equity drivers, are they getting affected by what we're doing? And then the sales and the ROI metrics. But we were very clear from the beginning that for us, the return on investment was both for short and long, you know? So we measured, we did a lot of modeling, we did market mix modeling, and we had short-term ROIs, but we were very, very insistent that we will always look at it together with the long-term.

20:03Of course, all this works where this whole population that we are working with is empowered and enabled with upskills and upskilling. And that is the topic we just spoke about before. That sounds like a lot of work. I know it wasn't easy, even as you describe it, but with hindsight is 2020. So I mean, back in 2015, 2016, I imagine, was there a debate about whether women, especially, would ever really buy lipsticks online, would buy bronzers and toners and stuff through the web? Because that was a bet that you made. So you saw something in the data which says, yes, we can sell billions of dollars worth of product direct online.

20:43We're going to make it happen. Where did that data insight come from? We saw the signals. And you know, the signals were first coming from a market like China, where the market was adopting online and e-commerce quite well, you know. And we had our first JBPs on Alibaba back in 2013-14. Then we started looking at the rise of Amazon. And, you know, when you look at signals, then we knew that search and search is changing again, and we'll talk about it. But search was changing dramatically in the US. And we knew that beauty searches, people were going to Amazon for it. So it was beyond just a channel.

21:22We knew that, no, there's something happening there. And then you take a bet. And of course, you put your resources and operating model around it. And so you spent 10 years working in China for L 'Oreal, correct? Give or take. All in all, I spent about 12 years of my life in China and I joined L 'Oreal in China. Okay. So I'm based in the United States, Western Europe my whole career. What do we need to know about the China market, the technology, the speed? And what is the one or two things that you've learned from China that you've applied to the rest of the world and we could all learn from?

21:56I spent 12 years, I told you, of my working life and personal life in China. When I'm a 90-year-old woman, if I'm a 90-year-old woman, I would tell all my grandchildren that there was time that I spent there. And what I learned from that experience was how a very large population of more than 1 billion, you know, was becoming a middle class, was modernizing, was digitalizing. And there was so much appetite for that change, you know. So you saw the consumer using WeChat all the time, using voice on WeChat, going to Taobao and Tmall, purchasing different things, doing a Chinese New Year, going to the 11-11, which is a single state.

22:43It was the consumer that was using it and adopting it. Yeah. And with that, of course, then the platforms and the infrastructure that was growing alongside that. but one was feeding the other, you know. And for us in marketing, it was the consumer behavior that was driving our own behavior in China. Therefore, I mean, you know, one of the things you learn is just to be very, very consumer centric around these subjects. Then you see there was a lot of understanding of and use and mutual kind of discussions on how that is working. So again, the partnership between those platforms was very close and we were both, both sides were learning together.

23:26So there's been a lot of talk about agentic shopping. I really want to get your opinion on this because you sell 30 % of your goods and services direct, right? Still 70 % is happening in store, which makes sense to me because people want to see the touch and feel the product when it comes to beauty. I just can't imagine a world, maybe my imagination is not there, where women are going to let robots buy their lipstick for them. Like it's an extra level of disintermediation. Do you think agentic shopping is really going to drive L 'Oreal's business, given the very personal aspirational nature of the purchase that people are making for your products?

24:03That's one part of a very big question. Before we answer that, we have to also understand what is changing, because we did speak about China and this and that, and I'll come back to your answer. But even before going to agent shopping, we have to understand where we are in terms of the total marketing journey in the last 20 years and in the last decade and all of that, you know. And then we can think about because it's from where are we coming and where are we going allows us to understand things better. In today's world, you know, what is working, what is not working. What is working is that because of data and AI and everything in the marketing itself, you have a lot of real-time insight to action.

24:51We can take action faster. Innovation can be faster. There is a democratization of creation. And so instead of a few people, hundreds of thousands of people and even millions of people can create and talk. And those can be super authentic conversations and be very positive. What is also working is this, that the platforms are driving so much products in terms of personalization, making it convenient for the consumer, making sure that they can use something, feel it. And we are making sure that the beauty experience is very, very good in that because we are constantly reinventing the beauty experiences within all of this.

25:34At the same time, what is not working as well for the whole industry and also therefore, you know, by definition for us also, and we have to be conscious of it, is what I would say two things that a question we have to ask is the focus between short term and long term. And which is where I said that when we talk about measurement, we are always talking about both short term and long term. What is also a question for the industry is that how are we building brands in today's world? When we are democratizing so much, are we splintering the brand itself when different people are talking about it?

26:14How do we take this greater economy and make it a source of resilience for us? How do we preserve what is the essence and meaning of brands and what brand meant to that? So there are things that are working already and there are things that are not working as well or they need a question. If we have to sum up, and I'm going to come to AI, it's a very long-winded way to go to it, but if we start summing up the last decade of the marketeer's dilemma, there's one word that can sum it up and that word is fragmentation. Okay. Because it is the fragmentation which starts to create a lot of those questions to say, are we doing it right or wrong?

26:56And AI will only increase that. That's why I'm bringing it in. There's fragmentation at many levels. There's fragmentation of the consumer journey. You're going from brand, say, to creator, say, influencer, say, to people, say, peer-to-peer. More people are talking, it's fragmenting. There's fragmentation of the touch points in the consumer journey from offline to offline and online, to all the platforms, to the formats within the platform, to the hyper-personalization where it is fragmenting. So the consumer journey is fragmenting. You have product marketing, you have content marketing, you have influencer marketing, you have e-commerce marketing, you have data-driven marketing.

27:33Now you're going to get agency marketing. So there is a fragmentation because everybody's so busy in influencer marketing, you know, so busy learning and doing that. And then there is a fragmentation in terms of the marketing ecosystem. If you saw in the last two decades, the whole ecosystem has been fragmenting from the marketing services. We used to have like this one big partner who was telling us and helping us with everything to engage with the consumers and create content. And it was so much unbundling that happened. Unbundling of creative media, communication, advocacy influence, data. until you are fragmented into those services, into so many pieces.