Senior leaders from Chanel, Burberry, De Beers, Mulberry and L'Oréal gathered at Mortimer House in London for a BoF Careers breakfast on AI's impact on recruitment and talent retention.

BoF's commercial features editor Dan Hastings was joined by UK editor and technology correspondent Marc Bain to explore the attitudes of fashion and beauty workers towards AI. The session drew executives from some of the largest luxury and beauty houses in Europe, reflecting how prominently artificial intelligence now ranks on corporate talent agendas.

The invitation-only format allowed leaders to compare approaches on a question that touches every part of the hiring pipeline: how workers in fashion and beauty actually feel about AI, and what that means for companies competing to attract and keep them.

The event forms part of BoF Careers' programming for the global marketplace for talent from The Business of Fashion. For beauty specifically, the discussion lands at a moment when brands are restructuring teams around AI tools and rethinking which skills they hire for — with retention emerging as a deciding factor in how smoothly that transition goes.

Expect AI's role in recruitment and retention to remain a fixture of industry agenda-setting as beauty and luxury houses compete for talent that is both AI-literate and anxious about what the technology means for their careers.