CEOs Guide Employees Through AI-Driven Work Transformation

At the 2026 WWD Beauty CEO Summit, chief executive officer Michelle Peluso moderated a panel with CVS Health's Musab Balbale and Ghd's Jeroen Temmerman, WWD reports. Peluso said, "We've been through the digital, social and mobile revolutions - this change is more profound. It is also harder. It requires a lot of people change and culture change and workflow change," according to WWD.

Per WWD, Balbale said AI is "a tool that allows us to do everything differently" and that CVS is aiming to use AI to improve localization across 8,500 stores. WWD reports CVS has run occasional two-week "sprints" to have teams test AI-driven ways to streamline cumbersome tasks.

WWD reports Ghd deployed AI to build a six-question Curl Finder quiz for direct-to-consumer shoppers (about 30% of Ghd's business). Jeroen Temmerman told the audience the project "entered the world of hallucination" and required more than 2,000 human interventions to reach launch, and that the brand clearly labeled AI-generated quiz imagery to protect consumer trust.

Companies experimenting with consumer-facing AI frequently encounter hallucination and data-quality issues that increase human review load. Industry-pattern observations: teams deploying generative features tend to combine short development sprints with intensive human-in-the-loop (HITL) review to reduce harm and improve outputs. Labeling synthetic content is a common mitigation for trust risk in customer-facing workflows.

For practitioners, the panel underscores two recurring trade-offs: productivity gains from automation versus the coordination cost of integrating HITL processes, and the reputational risk driven by undisclosed synthetic content. Observed patterns in similar transitions: retailers pursuing store-level personalization often pair model rollout with localized KPI redefinition and cross-functional change management.

Indicators an observer can track include the cadence of sprint-based experimentation, the ratio of automatic outputs to human interventions in customer-facing features, and whether teams adopt explicit synthetic-content labels in marketing channels. WWD did not report a public statement from the panelists about long-term rollout timelines or vendor choices.