How AI Is Powering The Luxury Industry Now; Viva Tech, LVMH, L’Oréal

AI is continuing to power the luxury industry, optimising the consumer journey via hyper personalisation and creating efficiencies in the all consuming drive for content.

LVMH announced the winners of its ninth Innovation Award at a ceremony taking place during annual Paris technology fair, Viva Tech. The Group works with a number of technology startups, helping them scale via projects co-developed within its ecosystem and the Award spotlights its ongoing commitment to the talent shaping the future of luxury.

This year, the competition took a more streamlined format than previously, focused on specific projects within the LVMH ecosystem with ROI front and center. Three prizewinners in three categories—Best Impact, Best Business and Most Promising—were recognised for solutions realised together with particular Maisons.

Best Business Prize for the solution considered to drive business growth and operational transformation most effectively went to US based Kahoona, for its collaboration with Dior. According to LVMH, Kahoona’s real-time predictive audience segmentation solution for anonymised online visitors “took personalized customer experience to an unprecedented level.”

Here’s how Kahoona’s AI works

CEO Gal Rapoport described how his AI based technology recognised various criteria including customer intent, demographic and price point via “pattern recognition” within “digital body language and actioning these insights to route and optimize every customer journey.

French startup Genesis won Best Impact Prize for its collaboration with Moët Hennessy—a data-driven digital tool to measure, monitor and improve soil health. This award celebrates technology advancing sustainability and the Group notes the solution’s “significant potential for replication and development within the LVMH ecosystem.”

Most Promising Prize went to OMI, for its collaboration with Guerlain. Co-founder and CEO Hugo Borensztein describes his content creation studio as a “French pioneer in 3D AI”— essentially a more speedy and cost effective way to create high-quality visuals from 3D models. OMI also works with L’Oréal Group among many others, within CREAITECH, the latter’s Generative AI content platform.

Why AI content creation is king

While AI has gone from trend to industry staple, perhaps its most prevalent use case has come out as content creation.

During VivaTech, L’Orèal announced its collaboration with NVIDIA “to unlock AI’s potential across multiple aspects of beauty.” The Group will leverage the NVIDIA AI Enterprise platform for rapid development and deployment of AI, such as the scaling of aforementioned 3D digital product rendering alongside “personalized marketing and advertising that improve consumer engagement and conversion.”

The winning LVMH Innovation Award solution and those of the 12 other runners and riders were presented in the LVMH Dreamscape pavilion at Viva Tech.

Louis Vuitton showcased a groundbreaking innovation from Paris based studio Ok C’est Cool which has developed a proprietary gen AI powered content creation tool leveraging LoRA low-rank adaption (a technique used to adapt machine learning models to particular uses).

Essentially it teaches the AI to exactly reproduce ultra specific brand details such as textures enabling the generation of dozens of pics in one day. It works in conjunction with pre-existing 3D modelled images to impose variations within campaigns for efficiency and extreme fidelity.

While open source technology has democratised more rudimentary content reproduction, anything produced by LVMH must go above and beyond to conform to the standard of excellence demanded by the luxury Group says Ok C’est Cool co-founder Marc Horgues.

He added that the internalised solution is also paramount to preserve sovereignty of data.

AI at the LVMH Dreamscape Pavilion and beyond

Louis Vuitton also showcased its partnership with 3D scanning specialist, Danish startup Rigsters while Rimowa unveiled a collaboration with French startup Solaya on 2D and 3D content creation for its pre-loved RE-CRAFTED luggage. It leverages a combination of AI and Gaussian Splatting to produce high quality assets using a simple smartphone scan—resource-lite in that it can be done by anyone in the company anywhere in the world according to founder Massimo Moretti.

At Bulgari, Italian outfit Maize showcased its amalgamated AI technology for LLMs (large language models). Maize developed a bespoke educational and conversational solution optimising the brand’s written content to maintain tone of voice integrity across all mediums of communication.

In the AI Startup Village beyond the LVMH Dreamscape Pavilion (albeit still in the extended LVMH family) was Gen AI powered 3D asset management platform Power XYZ. It works with affordable luxury accessories brand Polène in which announced investment by LVMH / Arnault family owned fund L Catterton.