How omnichannel beauty brands will succeed: Renude launches its fourth insights report
From the data behind why AI agents could drive up to $5 trillion in global commerce by 2030 to an exclusive look inside Medik8 launch into Sephora North America with AI Skin Consultations, Renude’s latest industry report is essential reading for beauty brands navigating the shift to agentic commerce.
The beauty industry is moving faster than ever, and staying ahead means understanding not just where consumers are today, but where they’re heading next. Renude, the AI-powered skin advisor trusted by leading brands and retailers, has released its fourth Insights Report, and it’s packed with the intelligence beauty professionals need to compete as agentic commerce reshapes how consumers discover and buy.
Here’s what’s inside, and why you should download it now.
The Next Era of Online Shopping Has Arrived
Trend forecaster and freelance beauty journalist Theresa Yee returns to explain the biggest shift in online shopping since social commerce: the rise of agentic AI. Product discovery is entering a new phase, one where the shopping journey increasingly starts with a conversation, not a search bar.
The shift is already well underway. In a Bain & Company survey, 44% of US online shoppers said they now start their shopping journey in an LLM or split their search between AI tools and traditional search engines. In Europe, McKinsey found 46% of consumers in France, Germany and the UK use AI to discover products, while 55% use it to learn about a category before buying. And according to CI&T’s Retail Tech Report: Agentic Commerce Edition, 86% of consumers have either used an AI agent while shopping or are open to trying one, with Gen Z shoppers the most willing to embrace it.
Yee also unpacks the crucial distinction brands need to understand: the difference between “rented” agentic experiences that run on someone else’s platform, like ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot, and “owned” ones that live on a brand’s own site, where the brand keeps the data, the relationship and the trust. With only 27% of beauty businesses reporting they feel fully prepared for AI agents to become a primary discovery channel, despite 59% already exploring them, the report makes the case for acting now – while McKinsey projects AI agents could facilitate $3 trillion to $5 trillion in global commerce by 2030.
Medik8 Brings Renude’s AI to Sephora’s Shop Floor
The report also puts a spotlight on Renude’s newest retail milestone: powering Medik8’s launch into Sephora North America. The British skincare brand has rolled out across 250 Sephora stores in the US and 147 in Canada, and chose Renude as its partner for in-store AI skin consultations.
Delivered directly on the shop floor by trained Medik8 beauty advisors, each consultation takes just a few minutes: a customer answers a short set of questions and has photos taken for analysis, and Renude’s system, built by dermatologists and formulation scientists, returns a personalised assessment and routine from the Medik8 range, complete with the reasoning behind every recommendation.
Five Ways to Convert More of the Traffic You Already Have
For brands looking to turn today’s traffic into tomorrow’s revenue, Hannah Chapman, founder of beauty and skincare CRO consultancy GlowRate, shares her five-point playbook for converting more of the visitors already on-site, rather than just chasing more of them.
Chapman’s central argument: most beauty ecommerce sites lose customers not because of a traffic problem, but a clarity problem. Visitors form a judgement of a web page in as little as 0.05 seconds, so brands that make it instantly obvious what they sell, back up their claims with specific, credible proof, and design for scanning rather than reading convert dramatically more of the audience already on-site. One fragrance brand Chapman worked with saw conversion rate rise 38% and average order value rise 23%, with no redesign, simply by rethinking how the product was communicated.
Real Data. Real Results.
The report also shares fresh data from Renude’s own AI Skin Advisor, drawn from an analysis of customer conversations over the past three months. Personalised product recommendations remain the number one use case, as shoppers ask what’s right for their skin, closely followed by customers building a full routine around a single product they already love or are considering. These results are a clear signal that agentic conversations are working throughout the entire shopping funnel.
Renude Insights Volume 4 is available now. Whether you’re a brand director, marketing lead, retailer, or product developer, this is one of the most actionable reads available in beauty right now.
About Renude
Renude is an award-winning AI Skin Advisor, scaled to every customer. Its B2B white label technology is deployed by leading beauty brands and retailers globally to drive conversion and average order value, increase loyalty and build first-party consumer data. To book a demo, visit renude.co.
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