Ulta Beauty introduces Ulta AI and expands AI-driven shopping across digital platforms to deliver more personalised discovery, guidance, and seamless purchase experiences.
Ulta Beauty and Google have introduced Gemini-enabled innovations designed to make beauty shopping more seamless, personalised, and intuitive across digital touchpoints.
As beauty discovery increasingly shifts to AI-powered experiences, Ulta Beauty is expanding how customers discover, compare, and shop for products across its own digital properties and Google surfaces.
Ulta Beauty is rolling out agentic commerce within AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, enabling shoppers to receive product recommendations, compare options, and complete streamlined checkout for eligible purchases within conversational interfaces.
ALSO READ: Only 35% Contact Centre Leadership Reports Clear Long-term AI Strategy
“Ulta Beauty has always been about inspiring guests’ discovery through trusted expertise and curated choice. Now, we’re extending that same strength into AI-powered shopping experiences, making beauty discovery more seamless, personalised, and shoppable wherever it happens,” said Lauren Brindley, Chief Merchandising and Digital Officer, Ulta Beauty.
The experience is powered by the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard that enables agentic commerce across AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app.
Ulta Beauty has been an early collaborator with Google in exploring how this emerging commerce model can support categories where discovery, trust, and confidence are critical.
“Agentic AI has great potential to make online shopping easier for everyone, at every stage in the shopping journey — and Ulta Beauty’s implementation of the Universal Commerce Protocol is a vital step toward that future. By integrating UCP, Ulta Beauty is removing friction and helping their customers purchase right at the moment of discovery in AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app,” said Ashish Gupta, Vice President and General Manager of Merchant Shopping, Google.
“Ulta Beauty engaged early with UCP because we see a clear shift in how guests are discovering and shopping for beauty, with AI playing a much bigger role in that journey. We believe AI has the potential to elevate personalisation to a new level. In partnership with Google, we’re helping turn that potential into experiences that better serve our guests,” said Mike Maresca, Chief Technology and Transformation Officer, Ulta Beauty.
ALSO READ: Only 35% Contact Centre Leadership Reports Clear Long-term AI Strategy
By combining Google’s AI capabilities with Ulta Beauty’s assortment and omnichannel experience, the initiative aims to create more practical, personalised, and guest-centred shopping journeys.
On its own digital platforms, Ulta Beauty is also introducing Ulta AI, a new AI shopping assistant built on Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience.
The assistant leverages insights from Ulta Beauty’s customer base to provide personalised guidance, helping users navigate product choices, discover recommendations, and shop with greater confidence.
“Ulta Beauty is setting a new benchmark for the industry, ensuring they meet guests with helpful, personalised experiences wherever discovery begins. Our shopping agent connects the breadcrumbs of intent and inspiration to guide the customer journey. It skips traditional search filters and helps shoppers connect directly with products they love, providing a fast, tailored experience from discovery to checkout. By threading these moments together, every interaction becomes more meaningful and delightful for the consumer,” said Darshan Kantak, Vice President, Applied AI, Google Cloud.
“The next era of commerce will be shaped by how well retailers turn AI into practical, scalable capabilities. By combining Gemini Enterprise with Ulta Beauty’s data, systems and commerce infrastructure, we’re creating a more agile platform to innovate faster and scale new experiences across our digital ecosystem,” said Mike Maresca, Chief Technology and Transformation Officer, Ulta Beauty.
ALSO READ: Fraud Prevention is Now a Core CX Problem
Amplitude is a product analytics platform, enabling businesses to track visitors with the help of collaborative analytics. The platform leverages the capabilities of 
Zoho Social, a part of Zoho’s suite of 50+ products, is a comprehensive social media management platform for businesses and agencies. The Zoho Social dashboard includes a robust set of features, such as Publishing Calendar, Bulk Scheduler, and Approval Management to offer businesses all the essential social media publishing tools. Its monitoring tools help enterprises track and respond to relevant social conversations.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 represents a robust cloud-based CRM solution with features such as pipeline assessment, relationship analytics, and conversational intelligence. It utilises AI-powered insights to provide actionable intelligence via predictive analytics, lead scoring, sentiment analysis, etc. Currently, Microsoft operates in 190 countries and is made up of more than 220,000 employees worldwide.
HubSpot is an inbound marketing, sales, and customer service software provider, offering robust CRM and automation solutions. Some of its products include Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Operations Hub, Content Hub, Commerce Hub, Marketing Analytics and Dashboard Software. Guided by its inbound methodology, HubSpot enables companies to prioritise innovation and customer success.
Monday.com is a project management software company, offering a cloud-based platform that enables businesses 
Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Freshworks is a global AI-powered business software provider. Its tech stack includes a scalable and comprehensive suite for IT, customer support, sales, and marketing teams, ensuring value for immediate business impact. Its product portfolio includes Customer Service Suite, Freshdesk, Freshchat, Freshcaller, Freshsuccess, and Freshservice. Freshservice for Business Teams has helped several global organisations to enhance their operational efficiency.
Talkdesk offers an innovative AI-powered customer-centric tech stack to its global partners. The company provides generative AI integrations, delivering industry-specific solutions to its customers. Talkdesk CX Cloud and Industry Experience Clouds utilise modern machine learning and language models to enhance contact centre efficiency and client satisfaction.
The company offers comprehensive cloud-based solutions, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, Gaming Consoles, Microsoft Advertising, Copilot, among other things, to help organisations offer enhanced CX and ROI. Its generative-AI-powered speech and voice recognition solutions,such as Cortana and Azure Speech Services empowers developers to build intelligent applications.
IBM is a global hybrid cloud and AI-powered 
Uniphore is an enterprise-class, AI-native company that was incubated in 2008. Its enterprise-class multimodal AI and data platform unifies all elements of voice, video, text and data by leveraging Generative AI, Knowledge AI, Emotion AI and workflow automation. Some of its products include U-Self Serve, U-Assist, U-Capture, and U-Analyze. Its Q for Sale is a conversational intelligence software that guides revenue teams with AI-powered insights, offering clarity on how to effectively keep prospects engaged.
Google Cloud accelerates every organisation’s ability to digitally transform its business. Its enterprise-grade solutions leverage modern technology to solve the most criticial business problems 
8×8 offers out-of-the-box contact centre solutions, assisting all-size businesses to efficiently meet customer needs and preferences. It offers custom CRM integrations support and integrates effortlessly with third-party CRMs like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zendesk, and more. Offering global support in all time zones & development teams in 5 continents, its patented geo-routing solution ensures consistent voice quality.
Sprinklr is a comprehensive enterprise software company for all customer-focused functions. With advanced AI, Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform lets organisations offer human experiences to every customer, every time, across any modern channel.
Upland offers a comprehensive suite of contact centre and customer service solutions with products including InGenius, Panviva, Rant & Rave, and RightAnswers. InGenius enables organisations to connect their existing phone system with CRM, further enhancing agent productivity. Panviva provides compliant and omnichannel capabilities for highly regulated industries. Whereas, Rant & Rave, and RightAnswers are its AI-powered solutions, 
Hootsuite, headquartered in Vancouver, is a social media management platform that streamlines the process of managing multiple social media accounts. Some of its core offerings include social media content planning and publishing, audience engagement tools, analytics and social advertising. Its easy-to-integrate capabilities help marketing teams to schedule and publish social media posts efficiently.
Brandwatch enables businesses to build and scale the optimal strategy for their clients with intuitive, use-case-focused tools that are easy and quick to master. Bringing together consumer intelligence and social media management, the company helps its users react to the trends that matter, collaborate on data-driven content, shield the brand from threats and manage all the social media channels at scale.
Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of applications, capabilities, and services specifically designed to address day-to-day requirement for personalised customer experiences at scale. Its platform helps play an essential role in managing different digital content or assets to improve customer happiness. Its easy-to-optimise content gives users appropriate marketing streams, ensuring product awareness.
Salesforce-owned Tableau is an AI-powered analytics and business intelligence platform, offering the breadth and depth of capabilities that serve the requirements of global enterprises in a seamless, integrated experience. Marketers can utilise generative AI models, AI-powered predictions, natural language querying, and recommendationsons.
Contentsquare is a cloud-based digital experience analytics platform, helping brands track billions of digital interactions, and turn those digital 
Zoho Corporation offers innovative and tailored software to help leaders grow their business. Zoho’s 55+ products aid sales and marketing, support and collaboration, finance, and recruitment requirements. Its customer analytics capabilities come with a conversational feature, Ask Zia. It enables users to ask questions and get insights in the form of reports and widgets in real-time.
Fullstory is a behavioural data platform, helping C-suite leaders make informed decisions by injecting digital behavioural data into its analytics stack. Its patented technology uncovers the power of quality behavioural data at scale, transforming every digital visit into actionable insights. Enterprises can increase funnel conversion and identify their highest-value customers effortlessly.
Started in 2005 in a Sweden-based small town, Norrköping, Voyado offers a customer experience cloud platform that includes a customer loyalty management system. This platform helps businesses design and implement customer loyalty programs, track customer 
TapMango provides a comprehensive, customisable, flexible and feature-rich customer loyalty program. The loyalty tools include an integrated suite of customised consumer-facing technology, easy-to-use merchant tools, and automation algorithms, all aimed at enhancing customer experience. Adaptable to any industry, TapMango’s platform helps merchants compete with larger chains, converting customer one-time purchases into profitable spending habits.
Adobe Experience Cloud offers a comprehensive set of applications, capabilities, and services specifically designed to address day-to-day requirements for personalised customer experiences at scale. Its innovative platform has played an essential role in managing different digital content or assets, to improve customer happiness or satisfaction. Some of its products include Adobe Gen Studio, Experience Manager Sites, Real-time CDP, and Marketo Engage.
