Parham Aarabi, chief executive officer and founder of Pre, took the stage at the 2025 WWD Beauty CEO Summit to ask the audience to think about how well the beauty tech solutions that they are currently using work. Is a makeup try-on solution increasing sales? Is a skin diagnostics tech increasing revenue? Is the AI chat increasing conversion rates?

When Aarabi first began speaking to retailers and brands about the impact that beauty tech was having on brands, he found that the biggest differentiator of whether tech was showing positive results is user experience. “User experience — which is the entire user journey, from discovery to engagement to everything that happens after, including potentially buying a product — matters more than anything else,” he said.

“When it comes to user experiences, often they are based on guesses and gut feelings,” said Aarabi. “When you guess sometimes you get it right, but sometimes you don’t and it leads to lost revenue.”

To offer brands a solution, Aarabi created Pre as a user experience optimization AI for beauty brands. He started by getting to know users better, including creating custom AI models for brands to better understand their audience. Each model aimed to understand which products were resonating with a brand’s audience, where users encountered frustration and what messaging was impactful.

Once in place, these testing models allowed brands to try new ideas to receive feedback on what would perform well based on the data the company already has about its audience. These models have been in testing over the last two years. In one example of brand testing, two key takeaways were that virtual try-on is very engaging, while AI chat interface was perceived negatively.

The Pre AI technology analyzes each model based on a heat map, showing where users pay attention, and predicts what click rates will be on each item. Brands using Pre’s AI technology can test 1,000 different ideas in a day and a half, versus what might have taken over a year.

“Imagine if you took a year’s worth of optimization for your brand and you could get a year’s worth in just over a day ­— how much more effective would things be?” said Aarabi. He explained that the optimization technology could be used on email campaigns or even marketing for an e-commerce experience.

In one partnership, a brand found that “AI tests are 1,000 times faster, 1,000 times less costly, but on par with human AB testing.”

Pre’s AI models can be built for specific segments. Aarabi said that brands can even use the technology to create multiple models with specificity that could narrow a single audience member. The models can be optimized to target a single segment based on generation or even a TikTok audience.

Putting this into practice with MZ Skin, Pre built a real-time AI model that would develop as the user navigates. When the AI had confidence, it would direct the next step in the user’s journey, such as providing a product recommendation, offering a promotion or prompting the user with a question.

“This kind of personalization will have more impact on beauty e-commerce sales than any other beauty tech that I have ever seen,” said Aarabi. “We’re really excited to bring this to market soon.”