In 2019, Shiseido acquired Drunk Elephant, one of the fastest growing skincare brands in the last decade. Drunk Elephant is a highly effective skincare brand with research proven results, established in the United States in 2013.

Founded by Tiffany Masterson, Drunk Elephant is renowned for its ingredient-elimination philosophy. Drunk Elephant newly launched in Chinese Mainland this April, rolling out in 270 Sephora stores across the country, where consumers can experience the brand’s award-winning products such as Protini Polypeptide Cream, Virgin Marula Luxury Facial Oil, and B-Hydra Intensive Hydration Serum here. Drunk Elephant is beloved by dermatologists, beauty editors, celebrities, and KOLs around the world, and has won over 450 awards globally.

Drunk Elephant has an engaged global community that the brand has built for over ten years. Drunk Elephant has a strong connection with its community and encourages consumers to “Listen to your skin” in order to find the right Drunk Elephant products based on their skin needs. Drunk GPT invites the Chinese consumer to be part of the Drunk Elephant community and learn about the brand’s unique skin philosophy and discover easy, customized skincare routines.

Hence, when Drunk Elephant launched in Chinese mainland, it lookedleverage cutting-edge technology to provide a highly interactive and memorable customer experience in its Wechat Community and offline activities.

Drunk Elephant partnered with Alibaba Cloud because it needed to work with a company that had cutting-edge technology, professionalism, and good leverage in China. Alibaba Cloud was familiar with the client’s industry and IT infrastructure, and, as the largest cloud computing company in China and Asia Pacific, offered digital expertise and a huge advantage in the Eastern market.

Alibaba Cloud explored the technical feasibility and creative ideas for AI-generated content (AIGC) engagement and provided consultation on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ensure Drunk Elephant’s needs were met. Alibaba Cloud offered project planning, including a proof-of-concept plan and a resource support plan, and worked with the client and delivery team on the acceptance criteria to ensure a quick and efficient workflow.

To answer Drunk Elephant’s needs, Shiseido worked with Alibaba Cloud to build “Drunk GPT,” an interactive multi-round dialogue LLM that understands text, audio, and images and focuses on skincare knowledge, relevant Q&A, product consultation, and product recommendations. Drunk GPT operates via two branches: Directly on Drunk Elephant’s WeChat mini program and through the GPT chat on the Drunk Elephant webpage.

Drunk GPT is deployed on an Alibaba Cloud Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK) cluster, its content response is powered by Alibaba Cloud’s Tongyi Qwen LLM, and it uses NLS to provide text-to-speech conversion. Alibaba Cloud’s Tongyi Qwen LLM, which is used by Drunk GPT, has surpassed the world’s leading AI technologies in assessments for Chinese language tasks and achieved the highest score for open source models in MMLU evaluation for English language tasks.

This solution based on retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and multi-agent workflows can effectively integrate Drunk Elephant’s private knowledge, such as product information, and trigger agentic workflows based on the user’s interactions, such as requesting the user to participate in a questionnaire. Finetuning was performed on top of the Qwen LLM to incorporate industry-specific knowledge and to deliver higher accuracies when responding to consumers’ queries.

In addition to the Drunk GPT interactive chatbot, Drunk Elephant’s partnership with Alibaba Cloud has resulted in improved online marketing and security.

With the help of Alibaba Cloud, Drunk Elephant runs interactive campaigns on the Drunk Elephant WeChat mini program, including attracting new customers through interactive AI picture generation challenges and running services for consumers via trained industrial models for brands. An example of the latter is allowing a space for AI to provide professional and interactive feedback to customers. These functionalities require multiple interactions with the app.

Alibaba Cloud has also built multiple security mechanisms that work with Shiseido’s high security standards in IT infrastructure. These content security measures will prevent abuse, such as the generation of inappropriate content, whether requested or retrieved.

Moving forward, the partnership between Shiseido and Alibaba Cloud for Drunk Elephant will focus on enhancing DrunkGPT, innovating input/output methods and information retrieval, and growing its capabilities in the Drunk Elephant WeChat mini program. Moreover, as AI and cloud technology improves, Shiseido will continue working with Alibaba Cloud to explore more AI-based innovations.