E.l.f. Beauty’s chief digital officer, Ekta Chopra, told Glossy at Shoptalk Spring that the company is “not a beauty brand anymore” but “entertainment.” Her four-pillar AI strategy — human productivity, process reimagination, agentic commerce, financial autonomy — contains no conversion-optimisation layer. That absence makes E.l.f. an outlier in a retail industry that has spent two years treating AI as a conversion accelerant. E.l.f. is building AI to hold attention.

The entertainment identity predates the technology. CMO Kory Marchisotto has described the brand as creating “an orbit that people want to be part of.” Chopra is now building AI infrastructure around the same idea. “It’s not about the checkout,” she told Glossy, “it’s more about being there as part of the consumer’s journey.” When the chief marketer and the chief technologist both optimise for time held, the organisation has made a deployment choice.

The four pillars Chopra outlined at Shoptalk show where E.l.f. expects AI to work. The first automates internal tasks, freeing employees from routine preparation. The second reimagines processes: E.l.f. invited Google, its chosen LLM provider, to its New York offices and ran a listening tour with the creative team that generated 100 AI use cases. The third builds brand authority inside large language models, with a dedicated team ensuring E.l.f. products surface in ChatGPT responses. The fourth automates finance operations end to end. Conversion optimisation does not appear.

The deployments confirm the priority. E.l.f.’s community bot, E.l.f.-fluencer, raised its response rate from 40% to 90% of incoming community questions, but the tool answers queries, not upsells. Product-description automation for Walmart and Ulta compressed what Chopra described as “weeks’ worth of work” into a scheduled automated refresh, keeping the brand visible across retailer platforms. The company partnered with Section AI to build “E.l.f. U,” a training programme that gives every employee AI prompting basics and subjects new tools to a review council before deployment. When E.l.f.’s community called AI-generated customer-facing content “not you; you’re not authentic,” the company pulled back rather than optimise through the objection.

A company projecting $1.6 billion in fiscal 2026 revenue, with its most recent quarter up 38% year over year, can afford to treat conversion as a consequence of attention rather than a direct target.

Chopra’s claim that “almost 60% of discovery is happening on LLMs” explains why brand authority inside ChatGPT is a strategic pillar. E.l.f. has built an internal team to scrape for data and optimise product content so it surfaces in the specific queries consumers enter into AI search. This is not SEO transplanted to a new platform; the queries are conversational, more specific, and more likely to return a single recommendation than a page of links. She drew the competitive lines: “Ulta went to TikTok, and then Sephora went to the LLM.” Brands with at least $30 million in annual revenue saw 97% year-over-year TikTok Shop sales growth in 2025, as reported by Modern Retail; Sephora, Chopra said, connected its 80 million loyalty members through a ChatGPT integration. E.l.f. is pursuing both channels, but the AI investment is weighted toward presence.

This is plausible, but only if your average product costs seven dollars and your buyer discovers it through entertainment feeds. The entertainment-first model depends on high volume, low price, and a consumer who enjoys the search as much as the product. Premium retailers with higher order values and longer decision cycles cannot defer conversion to a separate layer of the stack. For them, every AI-powered minute without a transaction is margin lost. E.l.f.’s deployment philosophy does not travel upmarket without significant structural modification.

Chopra told the Shoptalk audience that “the whole funnel is collapsing.” If that is true, a company that has already built AI around sustained presence holds a structural advantage over one that automated the checkout and must now backfill engagement. E.l.f. is betting that in a collapsed funnel, the brand that holds attention longest captures the transaction by default. That bet is funded and, at 38% quarterly growth, currently paying. Whether this attention-first model survives a deceleration in social commerce growth is the test that has not yet arrived.