Ekta Chopra, chief digital officer at E.l.f. Beauty, is moving at the speed of light when it comes to utilizing AI to power the beauty company forward.
“What’s changed is you can actually talk to AI now and AI can generate. The age of AI has gone from curiosity to true capabilities that businesses can use for business value in many different ways,” she said during a presentation at the 2025 WWD Beauty Inc Catalysts conference in New York.
“It is probably the most game-changing tech evolution that has ever happened before,” she continued. “In the 1800s when railways were invented in America, it was about connecting different cities. It’s now about data connecting to different ecosystems to give you the intelligence and the tracks that you need to use the power of AI.”
In terms of marketing, she stressed that AI is changing the landscape forever, noting that 60 percent of Gen Z and Gen Alpha are using ChatGPT every day to search, learn and even converse with.
Fundamentally, AI is changing a brand’s connection with the buyer, according to Chopra.
“An average search in Google is five words: ‘I want E.l.f. Skin’ or ‘I want some skin care,’” she said. “An average search in ChatGPT is 23 words: ‘I want E.l.f. skin for a Millennial, and I want it not to have this ingredient, and it should be this texture.’ That’s context that you have to give to your data, to your content. If you don’t have that context, you are not the authority in any of the LLMs. You will disappear because somebody else will be cited as the authority of the brand.”
Search, to that end, has evolved past search engine optimization to answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization. This means that brands are no longer just optimizing for a five-letter search; optimizing for AEO and GEO is about not just links, but intricate language.
“The content structure is changing,” she continued. “All of that now needs to be a story that’s written that can be searched in an LLM, so this is a lot of work that the brands have to do to go from clicks to citations….If the citation is not your brand, you better get to work, because that’s the number-one thing that you have to do in order to be even ready for shopping with AI.”
All this work is currently underway at E.l.f. “We’re moving from keywords to storytelling and really making sure all our PDPs, our FAQs are ready for this. It’s not just about traffic, but it’s also about being the authority for your brand, so you don’t lose in this race for AI.”
But building this authority is not one department’s job, Chopra said.
“This is not the chief digital officer doing a bunch of work with robots. It’s about bringing humans together. It’s about creating a coalition in the team. It’s a mindset shift. Our chief marketing officer is actually championing this work from storytelling to products, so we don’t lose our identity.…But you also have to structure it so it shows up as authority in the LLM, so your brand, your PR, your FAQs, your storytelling, it’s a whole group coming together, and right now we are revamping and changing all our content to be ready for being in the search.”
To this point, when anyone is onboarded at E.l.f., they have to go into the AI hub and learn AI from Day One.
“Human behavior is changing,” Chopra said. “All brands have to adapt, otherwise you won’t be relevant.”
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