ULTA
Beauty shopping, now with a chatbot
Ulta Beauty just announced a fresh partnership with Google that sounds a little like Sephora met ChatGPT at Cloud Next. The company is launching agentic commerce across Google surfaces and rolling out Ulta AI, a shopping assistant built with Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience.
Why this matters
The idea here is simple: when you’re hunting for the right foundation shade or trying to remember which serum your skin actually likes, AI can do more than just scream product names at you. Ulta wants to make discovery, comparison, and checkout feel more seamless — and keep you in Ulta’s orbit instead of letting the internet’s chaos do the choosing for you.
That’s important because beauty is a high-frequency, recommendation-heavy business. If Ulta can make shopping feel more personalized and less like a digital scavenger hunt, it could boost engagement, conversion, and repeat purchases. In retail, fewer clicks usually means fewer chances for a customer to wander off into the void.
The bigger play
This isn’t just a shiny tech demo. It’s Ulta signaling that AI is becoming part of the store aisle, not just the back office.
- Ulta AI could help shoppers find products faster and with more confidence
- Google surfaces give Ulta a bigger digital billboard where shopping decisions happen
- Agentic commerce hints at a future where AI helps move the customer from “hmm, maybe” to “add to cart”
Big picture: Ulta is betting that the next wave of retail growth won’t just come from more products — it’ll come from making the path to purchase feel almost embarrassingly easy.