What challenges did The Estée Lauder Companies face before AI implementation?

ELC had insight data spread across many brands and file formats, making it hard for employees to find and synthesize consumer and product-development insights quickly. The scale and complexity of the organization caused duplicative studies and delays in activating with consumers.

What was the impact of the AI solution?

Reduced the time required to gather data from weeks to minutes. Enabled product developers and marketers to get to market faster. Helped teams respond more quickly to trend shifts and focus on strategic work instead of tedious data gathering.

Source

MicrosoftEvidence: Low40/100

The Estée Lauder Companies—ConsumerIQ agent with Copilot Studio and Azure OpenAI

Use case typeInvestment researchUpdated Jun 13, 2026

With nearly 25 brands under the ELC umbrella, the company generates a high volume of insights about product development and marketing. To remain competitive, it needed a solution to help find insights faster and inform consumer-centric decisions. ELC worked with Microsoft to build an AI agent, ConsumerIQ, with Copilot Studio. ConsumerIQ is underpinned by Azure OpenAI Service to analyze documents, identify trends, and provide strategic recommendations. By centralizing information and applying a sophisticated AI tool, ELC has reduced the time required to gather data from weeks to minutes. This allows product developers and marketers to get to market faster and respond quickly to trend shifts.

Organization: The Estée Lauder Companies
Industry: Consumer & Food
Location: United States
Published: May 2026

Reported outcomes

Strategic outcomes

Better decisions & insightCentralized consumer insight hubNew product / capabilityBuilt AI research assistantSpeed & agilityAccelerated insight gatheringSpeed & agilityEnabled faster go-to-market

Why do we believe this deployment?Customer identity, provider attribution, maturity, and source checks

Customer: The Estée Lauder Companies
Provider: Microsoft
Maturity: Unknown
Linked source: Microsoft Customer Stories

No explicit deployment-stage evidence found.

Customer identity supportedSource describes one deploymentMaturity evidence evaluated

Primary read

Use case focus

Showing 3 of 4

1AI agent
2Knowledge management
3Research and insights

ELC had insight data spread across many brands and file formats, making it hard for employees to find and synthesize consumer and product-development insights quickly.
The scale and complexity of the organization caused duplicative studies and delays in activating with consumers.

ELC created ConsumerIQ, an AI agent built in Microsoft Copilot Studio.
ConsumerIQ is underpinned by Azure OpenAI Service and uses a chat interface with natural-language questions, citations, and strategic recommendations.
The team centralized information and used Azure OpenAI to read research materials such as charts, graphs, and images, connecting disparate sources into a single intelligence hub.
The architecture also mentions Azure Functions apps and the ability to scale the low-code/no-code Copilot Studio solution to more use cases.

Technologies

Copilot Studio Azure OpenAI Azure Functions

Reduced the time required to gather data from weeks to minutes.
Enabled product developers and marketers to get to market faster.
Helped teams respond more quickly to trend shifts and focus on strategic work instead of tedious data gathering.

Architecture

ConsumerIQ is a Copilot Studio agent connected to Azure OpenAI Service and Azure environment integration; the article also references Azure Functions apps in the supporting architecture. Users query the agent in natural language and receive cited answers synthesized from centralized source documents.

Sources & evidence1

Evidence: Low40/100Evidence strength