CVS, Ulta and Mastercard are leveraging loyalty data to power AI shopping assistants, turning purchase histories into a defensible advantage in the AI commerce era.
Retailers have spent years collecting purchase histories, preferences and engagement signals inside loyalty programs. Those data sets are now the most actionable first-party assets a retailer owns, and the companies moving fastest are connecting them directly to artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Ulta Beauty, which counts more than 46 million loyalty members responsible for roughly 95% of company sales, partnered with Google in April to embed its assortment inside Google's AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app. The same loyalty data feeds Ulta AI, a proprietary shopping assistant built on Gemini Enterprise that is live on Ulta.com. Sephora launched an app inside ChatGPT in March that lets users access Beauty Insider profiles through conversational AI. Both moves share a premise: loyalty data is the identity layer that lets AI agents recognize customers, personalize recommendations and connect discovery to verified purchase behavior.
The competitive pressure extends beyond beauty. CVS is turning its first-party loyalty and transaction data into a retail media advantage, connecting purchase behavior to advertising performance across channels. CVS Media Exchange has built a retail advertising business on 90 million customer relationships spanning beauty, health, wellness and personal care. “That relationship plus the loyalty plus the transaction data really sets retail media apart from any other medium,” Parbinder Dhariwal, vice president and general manager at CVS Media Exchange, told PYMNTS. “Not even social media is able to piece all of those constituents together.”
Mastercard is using generative AI to curate offers for individuals based on a 360-degree view of transactional, zero-party and first-party data, Jill Moser, senior vice president of offers and loyalty at Mastercard, told PYMNTS. Visa's Avery Miller and Braze's Kipp Johnson described personalization as now “table stakes” in loyalty, with the real differentiator being context, relevance and the ability to orchestrate individualized customer journeys across the full lifecycle.
The common thread is first-party data that general-purpose AI models cannot replicate: a confirmed record of what a specific customer actually bought, when, at what price and how often. That record allows personalization models to move beyond demographic targeting into behavioral prediction. Fanatics partnered with Google Cloud to deploy AI-powered product discovery using behavioral data from its loyalty base, surfacing the right product when purchase intent peaks. Eagle Eye, which works with major grocery, retail and hospitality brands, built its AIR platform as a real-time loyalty and promotions engine designed to unify customer data, digital offers and transactional systems.
AlphaScala's proprietary scores reflect how these companies are positioned. CVS carries a Moderate score of 57, Ulta a Mixed 47, and Mastercard a Moderate 72, each indicating varying readiness to monetize loyalty data in the AI era.
More than 6 in 10 U.S. consumers used dedicated AI platforms including ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini in the past year, with power users increasingly replacing legacy shopping behaviors rather than supplementing them. The loyalty program that once rewarded past spending is now being engineered to shape the next decision before the consumer has finished searching.
Drafted by a large language model from the source reporting linked above, then screened by automated publishing checks. It is not read by a journalist before publication. Some articles cite our Alpha Score. Verify prices and figures against the original source. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.