ConsumerIQ is an AI-powered intelligence hub that The Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) built using Microsoft Copilot Studio and Azure OpenAI Service. ELC operates nearly 25 brands across 150 countries and generates a large volume of consumer, market, and industry data in formats like PDFs, PowerPoints, and spreadsheets. This information is rich with insights for product innovation and marketing, but it was scattered and time-consuming to access. ConsumerIQ was created to: - Centralize decades of research and insights in one place. - Let teams ask natural-language questions (for example, “What are the trends in night cream?”) and get summarized, actionable answers with citations. - Analyze documents, identify trends, and provide strategic recommendations by connecting disparate data sources. In short, ConsumerIQ helps ELC turn its existing intelligence into a practical, easy-to-use tool that supports faster, consumer-centric decisions across its brands.

ConsumerIQ has reshaped how ELC teams access and use data in several concrete ways: 1. **Speed to insight** - Time to gather data has been reduced **from weeks to minutes**. - Teams no longer need to manually search through multiple documents and systems. 2. **Better use of existing research** - Centralizing insights reduces duplicate studies and redundant work, saving time and money. - Employees can see and reuse existing knowledge instead of recreating it. 3. **More strategic focus** - By automating tedious data-gathering and summarization, teams can focus on higher-value work like creating marketing strategies and developing new products. - Marketers and product developers can quickly query trends (for example, “What is the mascara trend with daily exercisers?”) and immediately get data-backed answers with references. 4. **Faster response to market shifts** - In a fast-moving beauty environment (for example, trends emerging on TikTok), having insights on demand helps ELC get products to market faster and respond more quickly to changing consumer behavior. Overall, ConsumerIQ supports more informed, timely decisions and gives ELC a practical way to compete with smaller, more agile players by using its own intelligence more effectively.

ELC chose Microsoft Copilot Studio and Azure OpenAI Service for a few key reasons: - **Seamless integration with existing environment**: Copilot Studio is tied into ELC’s Azure environment, which made it easier to connect to their data securely and at scale. - **Generative AI capabilities**: Azure OpenAI Service enables ConsumerIQ to read and interpret complex research assets, including charts, graphs, images, and documents, then surface trends and strategic recommendations. - **Low-code / no-code flexibility**: Copilot Studio’s low-code approach allowed ELC teams to build and extend AI agents without needing to start from scratch. For example, one leader created a separate supply chain agent that pulls answers from specific documents she can access. Looking ahead, ELC plans to: - **Integrate more data sources** to enrich the insights available through ConsumerIQ. - **Scale usage across all brands and functions**, beyond marketing and insights, into areas like supply chain and manufacturing. - **Empower more business users** to build domain-specific agents using Copilot Studio, so AI support becomes part of everyday work across the organization. The broader goal is to reimagine how ELC uses its accumulated experience and data, making intelligence accessible to more people and helping the company stay competitive in a fast-changing market.