Prestige skincare and hair care manufacturer KDC/ONE has entered a multi-year strategic partnership with beauty industry AI platform Potion AI to integrate artificial intelligence into its R&D workflows, beginning with selected North America laboratories and expanding globally.
According to Potion AI’s press release, the agreement moves AI from pilot testing into day-to-day use across ingredient research, formulation development and regulatory screening, areas that have traditionally relied on manual searching and validation.
Why now?
KDC/ONE said the decision to formalize the partnership was driven by alignment and platform maturity rather than experimentation.
“What stood out was that Potion wasn’t a generic AI tool adapted to our space, but a first-to-market, mature platform built specifically for beauty by a team with deep domain expertise,” Craig Onofry, Chief R&D and Innovation Officer at KDC/ONE told CosmeticsDesign. “Both sides are focused on successfully deploying the platform in a manner that meaningfully impacts real workflows.”
According to Onofry, the goal is to integrate the technology into how teams already work rather than introduce another standalone system.
Accelerating early-stage formulation and research
The company expects the most immediate operational benefits “to show up early in the R&D lifecycle, particularly during phases like ingredient research, feasibility assessment and formulation development,” Onofry said, anticipating “immediate improvements in formulation development timelines.”
He added that the platform is not intended to standardize formulas or replace expertise. “The opportunity here is not about reusing formulas, but about equipping every chemist and regulatory professional with an assistant at their disposal,” Onofry said.
Supporting chemists with earlier insight and compliance
Potion AI said the partnership demonstrates how AI can be applied meaningfully when paired with domain-specific data and existing expertise.
“What makes AI truly valuable in enterprise environments isn’t the technology alone, but the quality, structure and context of the data it’s applied to,” Hejab Malik, co-founder of Potion AI told CDU. “Some of the most valuable knowledge exists in unstructured formats: PDFs, lab notebooks, internal reports, regulatory documents and historical formulation work.”
Both companies emphasized that the platform is designed to support, not replace, formulation teams. “We are not looking for a push-button formula generator,” Onofry said. “The platform is used to surface relevant information, historical context and regulatory considerations earlier in the process, while leaving formulation strategy and final decisions firmly in the hands of experts.”
Earlier access to regulatory insight is expected to reduce rework. “When regulatory insights are available when an ingredient is being selected or a product is being formulated, teams spend less time pursuing paths that will eventually be blocked,” Malik said.
