Automat Technologies Inc, a Montreal company that provides conversational artificial intelligence (AI) marketing for brands, has partnered with L’Oréal to release a series of beauty services through the Facebook Messenger platform. Slack previously invested in Automat for an undisclosed amount last July.

This partnership is based on the conviction that conversational marketing and conversational commerce coupled with artificial intelligence are bringing new opportunities to brands to engage in a continuous and personalized dialogue with consumers.

The first L’Oréal service to launch in Canada will be a gifting service building on the Messenger platform. The Beauty Gifter is an intelligent beauty products discovery and transaction bot. The objective of the service is to help consumers to find the right beauty box gift for their friends based on a series of contextualized questions that define their friend’s beauty profile and help consumers select the right brand, and the right product mix at the right budget.

Big day for L'Oréal & Automat partnership. Launched https://t.co/KCteweN5Kj - read about it here: https://t.co/pFOGSLs2hj pic.twitter.com/bXOiYxdrD6

— Andy Mauro (@andymauro) April 19, 2017

“We are excited to pioneer this new field of conversational commerce and artificial intelligence and continue to build services that support our products and enhance our overall consumer experience. We believe that those new Messenger based services are truly solving consumers’ pain points by leveraging the power of AI and bringing it to build personalized relationships with them”, said Lubomira Rochet, Chief Digital Officer and member of L’Oréal’s Executive Committee. “Automat is literally defining this new category of Conversational Marketing and we’re excited to partner with them to advance the state of the art in this new field.”

L’Oréal has been recognized as a pioneering brand in the field of conversational commerce and featured at the 2017 Annual Facebook Developer conference F8.

“We’ve been incredibly impressed with how fast moving and nimble L’Oréal is and their ability to work effectively with startups. Additionally, as the world’s largest beauty brand, the level of care and consideration they show towards their customers and the how dedicated they are to constant innovation both in their beauty products but also their digital products is an inspiration for us both as Conversational Marketers and technologists”, said Andy Mauro, CEO of Automat.

L’Oréal says it plans to build on its relationship with Automat further establish Montreal as a center of excellence in AI, which already boasts some of the most prestigious groups of deep learning researchers in the world, is home to leading universities such as Université de Montréal and McGill University, and has a burgeoning AI start-up community.