Combining essence’s new digital strategy alongside its brand claim to “make beauty fun,” we knew the path forward was in innovation and emerging technology. Luckily, essence is no stranger to innovating. In the past, they’ve pioneered Roblox experiences and CGI content production with success. 

At the end of 2023, DEPT® and essence strategized around a new brand touchpoint: a virtual assistant. To be more precise, an AI-enabled virtual assistant.

This assistant would be the enabler, connector, and cheerleader for the essence community, engaging with customers through conversations. With her ability to give advice, she could help customers learn about and explore new products and beauty trends in a fun, easy way. 

As a new conversational layer in essence’s experience strategy, she will become integral to multiple channels, including website, social, events, and POS. 

To bring Kenna to life, we combined multiple technologies, making it one of the first prototypes that gives AI a face, voice, and body – just like we envision the future of AI assistants: a super smart helper with a human touch.

Brain: The GPT is built off DEPT®’s proprietary generative AI product development framework. This platform is a custom-built AI system with knowledge bases, product feed integration, and guard rails  – a fully customized brand language model. 

Ears: OpenAI Whisper allows her to listen to user voice requests (in any language) and understand them within context. 

Voice: A custom voice was created through ElevenLabs and is 30% based on an essence employee’s voice. 

Body: We also created a 3D character that is “real-time ready.” This means that she reacts to conversations with a set of custom gestures. 

To top it off, Kenna is an AI microservice that allows her to be deployed across various platforms. 

Kenna debuted at OMR Festival in the spring of 2024 and has big plans for the future. 

Using an interactive installation, visitors talked to Kenna in their native language, and she understood and responded in a Gen Z savvy way – accompanied by mimics, gestures, and lip-syncing.

This launch was the first time most users could conversationally interact with a 3D-realtime virtual beauty assistant. 

So what’s next for Kenna? Our ambitious roadmap for her includes going live on the essence website, adding live events (like festivals), and integrating retail POS. 

Because technology is moving so fast, optimization will be an ongoing process. We continue to work with essence to innovate and integrate Kenna into the digital ecosystem.