L'Oréal's Dubey: AI search runs 11 minutes, not minutes

Dubey's career tracks the layers marketing has absorbed over three decades: she started in advertising in 1997 in India, worked on Suzuki ads and a James Bond campaign for Ericsson, then moved into planning and media to learn Excel and large datasets, followed by e-commerce, search, TikTok, and social listening. Each new technology added a layer to the marketer's toolkit. What she says is different now is scale: AI reaches into how companies generate insights, develop content, target audiences, and measure returns, and increasingly into how consumers decide what to buy.

At L'Oréal, that has pulled marketers into territory that once belonged to other functions — Dubey describes sitting data, IT, and marketing teams together to ask what the processes and architecture are, and whether the marketing engine is ready for today and tomorrow. The group's AI strategy has three pillars: helping employees work with AI, embedding it across functions including marketing, research, and operations, and understanding how AI changes the consumer journey. The plumbing she describes includes standardizing advertising accounts and product data across platforms, and treating product detail with the same care marketers first learned in e-commerce.

Her caution is that fundamentals do not stop mattering as technology deepens. A universal commerce protocol might make 100,000 SKUs available to an AI system, but that does not tell it what a brand should be famous for; a sunscreen can be described as SPF 50, or through the context in which someone would actually use it. She has pushed her own senior executives to build an ad with AI end to end, on the grounds that reading about it is not the same as doing it. The stakes, on her account, hinge on whether that hands-on literacy spreads through an organization that works with hundreds of agencies — and on whether marketers can keep the consumer need at the center as the technology layer thickens.