For the past 18 months, Brian Franz has overseen all data, technology, and analytics at Estee Lauder, the first-ever C-suite leader to fill that role at the beauty giant. As of Tuesday, his role promises to be even more transformative. This week, the M.A.C and Clinique purveyor, which ranks No. 315 on the Fortune 500, announced Franz has been appointed to the newly expanded role of chief technology and transformation officer, where he will continue to oversee the global IT team, further integrate partnerships with Shopify and Accenture, promote more internal and external use of artificial intelligence, and be tasked with leading enterprise-wide initiatives focused on supporting revenue growth and improving productivity. “We have amazing brands and really great history, insights, and data for 80-plus years now,” says Franz, who previously served as CIO at financial-services firm State Street, liquor maker Diageo, and food behemoth PepsiCo.
“But, we had to really position ourselves for where we need to be in the future.”
What that has meant for Franz is ensuring that all 14,000 of Estee Lauder’s employees have broad access to AI productivity tools including Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT, while also investing in more narrow AI use cases to speed up formulations and improve efficiencies at the company’s manufacturing facilities. AI is also changing how millions of consumers shop for beauty brands on chatbots like Gemini and Claude, further complicating and accelerating a discovery process that’s already been upended by TikTok, Instagram, and other social media platforms. Transformation has been a key theme at Estee Lauder, which only two years ago was facing weaker demand for cosmetics and fragrances and facing criticism that the company hadn’t pivoted speedily enough to the digital world that has driven consumer purchase patterns. Stephane de La Faverie, a 14-year Estee Lauder veteran, was hired to serve as its new CEO to formulate and execute a turnaround plan called “Beauty Reimagined.”
Beyond vowing to increase advertising spending and remove complexity in how Estee Lauder’s teams work, de La Faverie also lured in new talent for his C-suite, including hiring Franz from State Street and Nestlé alum Aude Gandon, who serves as chief digital and marketing officer.
Fiscal fourth-quarter results from Estee Lauder in August have shown these efforts are beginning to pay off: strong demand for luxury fragrances and skincare drove results above Wall Street’s expectations and Estee Lauder’s annual profit forecast for the current year also had positive upside. Franz says his mandate will include all technology efforts that can improve product formulation, better forecast demand, smooth operations at the manufacturing plants, and boost worker productivity.
All of these investments are intended to support his three key priorities: creating an omnichannel shopping experience that’s as frictionless as possible, unifying disparate sources of data across a decades-old organization, and adding a dash of “AI everywhere” for buyers and employees. “The running and operations of technology every day has to get more and more productive,” says Franz. “And then, we have to shift as much of the investment into these consumer-facing, revenue-enhancing, or margin-expansion activities.”
His AI bets have included working alongside Google Cloud to launch a consumer-facing, AI-enabled scent advisor for Estee Lauder’s Jo Malone London brand, working closely with software provider Adobe to use more generative AI for the company’s digital marketing campaigns, and launching a “formula navigator” AI tool that’s improved product development efficiency by 20%. Another AI use case is “Ella,” which stands for Estee Lauder Line Assistant, to help operators address equipment issues and lessen the time needed to switch manufacturing lines between different product runs. To bring employees along the journey, Franz says Estee Lauder has embraced the “reverse mentor” model that empowers younger team members who are early technology adopters to teach more senior leaders about the latest AI tools.
There are also AI champions that have been identified within each of Estee Lauder’s brands—the company has more than 20 within its portfolio—to help spearhead usage, which more recently, includes idea sharing around building AI agents. “Adopting new ways of working is always something that takes incredible effort,” says Franz. “Culture and change drive all the outcomes. The technology doesn’t adopt itself.”
More Read
Franz also recently hired professional services firm Accenture for the parts of the business that Estee Lauder outsources, which includes running the company’s technology applications and environment, as well as performing many of the finance, accounting, procurement, human resources, and e-commerce marketing functions.
Yet another key vendor that Estee Lauder has tapped is e-commerce platform Shopify, which is helping run Estee Lauder’s direct-to-consumer omnichannel business and making it easier for online shoppers to buy beauty products with fewer clicks. Next month, Estee Lauder will also turn on Shopify’s agentic feature—which helps brands get discovered on AI chatbots—for the first time beginning with M.A.C. Consumer and retail brands like Estee Lauder are only recently wrapping their heads around generative engine optimization, or GEO, which refers to the tactics that need to be honed to promote accurate product discovery across the large language models that underpin chatbots. “The LLMs decipher what real consumers are saying, and what it is that they understand about the products we make,” says Franz. “What we’re focused on is that they find us in the LLMs, but then, within a click or two clicks, buy that product. It is still early.”
John Kell
NEWS PACKETS OpenAI debuts Astra, while Meta unveils Muse. Two big, splashy product announcements in the AI world include the launch of OpenAI’s newest and most powerful model , GPT-6 Astra, and Muse from Meta, an AI shopping agent that connects to the company’s social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook as well as third-party apps like Shopify and Gmail.
Both debuts came with a bit of an asterisk, for OpenAI, Fortune reports that the AI giant changed some evaluation benchmarks for GPT-6 Astra since first publishing a blog post announcement about the model on September 3. In some instances, the new version showed Astra performed better, while the numbers for models from rival Anthropic got worse. And for Meta, media coverage homed in on privacy concerns , which are elevated at the company given its mixed track record with other consumer-facing AI initiatives involving its AI glasses and a recently spiked AI image generator on Instagram . U.S. pushes G20 to adopt light touch to AI regulation. The Group of 20 nations have agreed to guidelines that were pushed by the U.S. that avoided the creation of new regulatory bodies for AI governance.
The document, called the Carolina Principles, also called for more collaboration between governments and private corporations to vet AI technologies. The guidelines will be up for a formal vote at the next G20 summit in December and would be a win for the tech lobby, as SpaceX, Nvidia, and OpenAI are among the industry titans that have sought light regulatory oversight. And yet, within the U.S., state lawmakers in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, California, and several other states continue to advance bills regulating AI as polls show steady opposition to the industry. Nvidia acquires Hugging Face for $13 billion. On Thursday, Nvidia announced the AI chipmaker’s second-largest takeover, spending billions to scoop up the 10-year-old New York startup Hugging Face, a platform that’s used to build, share, and run AI models.
More Read
As Fortune reports , Hugging Face has 18 million individual users and 200,000 enterprise clients with aspirations to get to “100 million AI builders in the next few years,” according to the company’s co-founder and CEO Clément Delangue. The Wall Street Journal published a deep feature on Hugging Face’s founders—they originally came together to build a chatbot that wasn’t “boring” like Apple’s Siri—while CNBC explains the deal benefits Nvidia by bringing it closer to AI developers, while also defensively keeping the platform out of a competitor’s sphere of influence. Anthropic close to finalizing pre-IPO credit facility. Bloomberg and Reuters are among the outlets that reported this past week that Anthropic is close to wrapping up a $15 billion revolving credit facility. Reuters, meanwhile, reports Anthropic is expected to kick off marketing its IPO in the middle of October and likely complete the listing before the U.S.
midterm elections in November. But on a more dour note, WSJ reports this week that an Anthropic researcher quit the company due to concerns that AI development is “out of control,” echoing fears that several others from AI labs at big hyperscalers like OpenAI have expressed when leaving the industry. New York City, Los Angeles announced AI bans for students.
Mere weeks after OpenAI debuted a version of the chatbot for teens that includes parental controls, the two largest American cities separately announced AI bans in their school districts. New York City’s public schools authorized a one-year moratorium that would prevent nearly 600,000 elementary and middle school students from using “student-facing generative AI.” One day later, Los Angeles announced it would also restrict the use of AI at all grade levels in the California city’s public school system. Students won’t be allowed to use Google’s Gemini chatbot, including within its Classroom software, but may still see AI summaries at the top of Google searches, the New York Times reports . ADOPTION CURVE Retailers, consumer goods companies see AI as a top growth driver.
Despite concerns about rising prices and inflation, economic data throughout 2026 has shown Americans are still willing to open up their wallets and spend, and have retained a relatively optimistic view of the nation’s economic conditions. And yet, when consumer products and retail companies were recently surveyed by consulting firm EY-Parthenon, 85% of respondents said the current market environment is “more challenging for growth” than it was a year ago. What’s driving that view? Increasingly, these companies are pinning their hopes on AI. When asked what best described their growth levers for the past 12 months, 66% reported “strategic AI,” which tied with “product market and market development” for the most frequently cited response.
“Operational AI and automation” ranked fourth at 60%, both easily besting product innovation, mergers, and price optimization. Four out of five of these consumer product and retail leaders say they are piloting or using AI tools for growth-related initiatives, yet only 33% report they trust AI to make these decisions. And the industry isn’t yet taking a ton of big swings: nearly 80% report that they are mainly using AI tools for some lower-stakes use cases to improve efficiency and productivity. Courtesy of EY-Parthenon
JOBS RADAR Hiring:
– Citi is seeking a global head of prime technology , based in New York. Posted salary range: $250K-$500K/year. – Harvard Business School is seeking a CIO , based in Boston.
Posted salary range: $300K-$375K/year. – Liberty Mutual Insurance is seeking a senior director of finance technology , based in Boston.
Posted salary range: $233K-$420K/year. – Baco Properties is seeking a director of technology , based in San Francisco. Posted salary range: $2145K-$150K/year. Hired:
– GXO Logistics appointed Balaji Rangaswamy to the newly created role of CIO, reporting to CEO Patrick Kelleher. As CIO at the logistics company, Rangaswamy will lead enterprise systems, architecture, and core technology capabilities. He joins GXO from aviation and defense technology company Collins Aerospace, where he served as VP of digital technology.
– American Healthcare REIT announced the appointment of Jon Crosier as CTO, where he will lead the enterprise data, analytics, and technology capabilities for the real estate investment trust. Crosier joins American Healthcare REIT after most recently serving as SVP and CTO of REIT Kilroy Realty. He also previously held technology leadership roles at real estate developer Irvine. – Staar Surgical announced the appointment of Ben Park as CTO, where he will oversee the innovation roadmap for the implantable lenses manufacturer. Park joins Staar Surgical from medical device company Align Technology, where he has served as head of emerging technology since 2018. He also previously served as CTO at Fingertips Lab and chief technologist at Volcano. – Merit Financial Advisors named John Rajes as CTO, where he will oversee the Georgia-based financial advisory firm’s enterprise technology strategy, including technology architecture, integrations, data, and AI.
Previously, Rajes held leadership roles at firms including LPL Financial, UBS, Barclays and Goldman Sachs. – Immunic appointed Chitrang Davé as chief data and digital officer, a newly created role at the late-stage biotechnology company where he will establish and lead enterprise-wide data systems, analytics, AI, and digital strategy. Prior to joining Immunic, Davé most recently served as head of enterprise data, AI, and advanced analytics at biotechnology firm Avidity Biosciences. – Datamaran announced Bert Sinnema has joined the risk and governance software provider as CTO, where he will lead the global engineering and product teams. Sinnema joins Datamaran from the cybersecurity firm Eye Security, where he served as VP of engineering. He also previously served as director of engineering at HackerOne and founded and served as CTO of SmartLockr.
