In the space of seven days, two of Europe's biggest consumer conglomerates, Nestlé and L’Oréal, announced major investments in their AI-powered, in-house content production systems.
Built on technologies including NVIDIA Omniverse, generative AI, and Microsoft Azure, the goal isn’t simply creative speed. It’s what I am calling operational sovereignty, ownership. In a way, this is corporate creativity’s Prince moment.
This is just the beginning. From outsourcing creative execution to embedding content as a core function of brand infrastructure others will follow. Both conglomerates are leveraging digital twins, AI-assisted workflows, and modular 3D assets to meet rising demands for ecommerce personalisation, platform localisation, and multi-format campaign delivery.
Nestlé: Content at Operational Scale
Nestlé has launched an in-house, AI-enabled content production service designed to "create high-quality product content at scale". This consists of over 4,000 digital twins, photorealistic, 3D replicas of Nestlé products. The company plans to increase that number to 10,000 within two years.
These assets are created once, then localised and reformatted for digital advertising, e-commerce, social platforms, and seasonal packaging. Already deployed across Nespresso, Purina, and Dolce Gusto, the system reduces production costs and lead times by more than 70%, according to Nestlé. The technology stack includes NVIDIA Omniverse, NVIDIA AI Enterprise, and Microsoft Azure cloud hosting.
A team of 250 in-house marketers, spread across seven global hubs and 45 content studios, powers a production model that is modular, repeatable, and ecommerce-native. With online sales now accounting for nearly 20% of Nestlé’s global revenue, content has become more than a communications tool. It’s a growth lever.
L’Oréal: Beauty as Engineered Experience
L’Oréal’s announcement at VivaTech in Paris introduced its multi-pronged collaboration with NVIDIA.
CREAITECH, L’Oréal’s internal generative content platform is now being scaled using NVIDIA AI Enterprise. The goal: faster creation of personalised, scalable beauty content.
CREAITECH integrates 3D product rendering with generative AI, enabling agile creative development for ecommerce, influencer marketing, and digital campaigns. As Asmita Dubey, L’Oréal’s Chief Digital and Marketing Officer, stated: "Our focus is to drive unparalleled consumer engagement with both creativity and technology."
L’Oréal also unveiled Noli, a startup backed by the group. Noli functions as an AI-powered marketplace, using proprietary diagnostic tools based on over 1 million skin data points and 1,000s of formulations to match customers with personalised product bundles. The infrastructure for this AI refinement, known internally as the AI Refinery, was co-developed with Accenture and NVIDIA, and also runs on Microsoft Azure.
Creatives, Repositioned and the Future of Agency Talent
Naturally, especially during Cannes Lions week, we are thinking about what is next for the industry. The evolution underway is not simply technical. It reshapes the role of creative professionals inside these organisations.
At Nestlé, creatives are now working more like product managers: overseeing workflows, managing localisation rules, and ensuring brand consistency across formats and markets. The shift is away from "making" and toward orchestrating.
David Rennie, Head of Strategic Business Units, Marketing and Sales at Nestlé, said: “...Our new content organization means we can do more with the talented teams we have, leveraging their skills to produce high-quality, consistent, scalable content supported by AI digital assistants and digital twin technologies. This is a big step forward in our journey to reimagine content creation and deliver exceptional digital experiences."
The company has already reached 72% of media investment in digital and more than 340 million first party data records.
In L’Oréal’s case, generative tools supplement traditional creative roles by automating image production, but leave room for creative direction, brand curation, and campaign coherence. The creative role is changing, but not disappearing. It is becoming more strategic, technical, and iterative.
This trend is reflected in wider data. According to D&AD, cited by Major Players, 88% of brands now operate in-house marketing teams, up 10% over five years. A benchmarking study from the In-House Agency Leaders Club (IHALC) shows that 83% of brands report better cost efficiency from in-house content models, while 79% report faster turnaround times.
Yet these shifts pose critical questions for the future of agency talent. As creative execution becomes increasingly automated or templated in-house, agencies are expected to deliver higher-order value: cultural insight, strategic direction, and creative originality that can't be produced by systematised workflows. And so here’s the opportunity for agency partners to remain as relevant and needed as ever.
Agencies will be courted by brands not for volume delivery, but for their ability to architect ecosystems, modular design systems, brand codes that can scale, and frameworks that enable internal teams to execute at pace without dilution.
Creative directors who once managed campaigns are now being asked to co-own operational design. Strategists must move fluently between narrative and infrastructure. And producers must think in distribution-ready templates rather than one-off assets.
What Comes Next: Volumetric and Spatial Content
With 3D asset libraries built and internal teams operational, the next horizon is immersive product storytelling. Volumetric photography and light field camera arrays could allow brands like Nespresso to present coffee as an ambient ritual, a crema, mid-pour, viewed from multiple angles.
For Miele, for instance, this technology could transform appliance engineering into visual proof. Steam spirals captured in 3D. Bread crusts rising in perfectly even bakes. The feature set becomes an experience and an argument for purchase.
Sovereignty, Strategy, and Agency Evaluation
Both Nestlé and L’Oréal are building content sovereignty. Not just for efficiency, but for flexibility, legal compliance, and creative control. With increasing regulatory attention around generative content (see: EU AI Act and US algorithmic accountability policies), having an auditable, in-house system is both a brand safety and business continuity measure.
Agencies remain involved but their role is shifting. Less production. More provocation. Less delivery. More discernment.
The brands that will incur growth will be those who treat content like infrastructure, not output. And the creatives who thrive will be the ones who can move between concept and code, aesthetics and systems.
This isn’t just about AI. It’s about control, trust, and what comes after the brief.
So what I would suggest asking current and and future agency partners is:
- Can this agency help us design creative systems, not just campaigns?
Beyond ideas, agencies need to demonstrate operational thinking—modular toolkits, version-ready templates, and frameworks that internal teams can execute independently. - Do they bring cultural context and foresight we don’t have in-house?
As internal teams cover execution, the agency’s value is in creative provocation, trend decoding, and narrative perspective that can’t be built internally. - How will this partner help us measure creative effectiveness beyond impressions?
In a world of high-volume output, performance must be tied to distinctive memory structures, emotional resonance, and brand consistency, not just clicks.
The agencies that survive this shift will be those who reframe their purpose not as content producers, but as strategic collaborators.
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