How E.l.f. Beauty is building AI into its community management

E.l.f. Beauty’s posts on TikTok and Instagram receive hundreds if not thousands of comments when they go online. Often, the comments include questions about when a product is launching, how the product compares to other E.l.f. offerings, or what type of skin or hair it’s appropriate for. To answer shoppers’ questions in real time, the company created an AI tool called E.l.f.luencer—trained on the company’s stylebook and years of human-written social comments—that autogenerates responses to...