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On 14 February, Vogue Business hosted the Meaningful AI Luxury Summit, in partnership with Google, against the backdrop of the Paris AI Action Summit and following on from the inaugural AI Luxury Summit that took place in summer 2024. Taking place at Google’s iconic Paris HQ, the event brought together tech leaders, founders, innovators and industry experts, with a focus on what makes artificial intelligence meaningful for brands and consumers, alike. The day kicked off with a keynote interview with Béatrice Dautzenberg, global beauty tech services director at L’Oréal, as well as an opening presentation from Aurélie Bié, Google Cloud’s business principal for retail, CPG and luxury, and Google global account lead Francois Pignol.
During the keynote session, Dautzenberg shared how L’Oréal uses beauty tech to “augment humans” and remove barriers for shoppers, not just in terms of improving the convenience of accessing products, but enabling them to access services and information for “embarrassing” problems that they would struggle to otherwise get help for. “What we’ve discovered is that people want to be able to ask any question, for example hair loss or hair colouring or having your first wrinkles linked to hormonal changes. People tell us they want to have a safe space with the stamp of L’Oréal — science and expertise — to be able to ask questions,” she said. Dautzenberg also spoke about how L’Oréal has experimented with creating makeup and skincare filters for all genders and skin types that adapt to video interfaces so that people can look put together on-screen when joining video meetings. She also described the unique partnership between Lancôme (one of L’Oréal’s luxury beauty labels) and Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences) to create HAPTA, a stabilising device that enables disabled shoppers to apply lipstick perfectly. Other tools include L’Oréal’s shade finder, which is accessible via phone and can adapt to various lightings and angles. The tool is able to detect more than 20,000 skin tones and match them with shades from Lancôme’s foundation range. By using this technology, Dautzenberg said: “We were able to realise that we were missing a few shades from our Lancôme catalogue. We saw an opportunity to develop shades based on the anonymised data from these scans.”
Host Anusha Couttigane, head of advisory and custom insights at Vogue Business, noted the wider conversation around inclusive AI, which is an important aim for L’Oréal as it evolves its beauty tech services. Dautzenberg showcased Beauty Genius, L’Oréal’s personalised AI beauty assistant, which brings AI to mainstream beauty shopping by providing personalised services, skincare diagnostics and recommendations — traditionally exclusive to more premium brands and delivered by personnel. She added that currently, L’Oréal has 1.8 billion packaged products that are equipped with QR codes and the company is bringing Beauty Genius to mass-market brands like L’Oréal Paris to provide even drug store shoppers with elevated experiences and information through the power of AI.
In the next session, Couttigane interviewed the founders and leaders of several AI startups, each touching on the different business challenges they’ve resolved through innovative solutions. During the first half of the startup spotlights, Couttigane hosted a panel discussion focused on optimising the go-to-market strategy. This featured Artem Kupriyanenko, founder and CEO of Genera; Stéphanie Smith, founder and CEO of ModaResa; and Ben Scheidt, investor at Redstone, the venture capital firm that backs Covision Media. Together, they discussed how AI innovations can elevate various stages of the marketing strategy, from the point of product creation and visualisation, using tools such as Covision’s automated 3D scanning and the creation of digital twins, to creating both the product and model visualisations that build into lookbooks, marketing assets and e-commerce product pages, as proposed by Genera.
Kupriyanenko and Scheidt discussed the operational efficiencies that businesses can derive from AI, by limiting the need for physical product prototypes and even creating opportunities for models. The potential to boost margins using these new approaches is what boosts the appeal of such businesses to investors, explained Scheidt. Meanwhile, Smith, founder of wholesale and business-to-business showroom tool ModaResa, explained how AI can be used to not only transform wholesale negotiations by reimagining how brands and buyers connect during key moments such as fashion week, but also how AI can create more sustainable ways of working.
In the second half of the startup showcase, Couttigane interviewed Marcello Vignocchi, co-founder and CEO of clienteling solution Alpha, and Marissa Loren, go-to-market director of Elevenlabs, the voice AI specialist that just raised $180 million in series C funding. Alpha is a clienteling tool that empowers sales associates in-store with instant access to data about a customer’s past purchases, preferences and style, with new developments including summary profiles about VIP clients using generative AI. The aim is to equip sales associated with instant access to information that enables them to deliver a more relevant and elevated service to luxury shoppers.
Meanwhile, Elevenlabs enables businesses to generate automated dubbing and translation with the same level of emotional tonality as original speech, and even the same voice in different languages. This tool helps businesses create translated content, marketing assets and even improve cross-border communications in real time by removing language barriers from interfaces like video calls. Continuing the theme of inclusivity, Loren described how text-to-speech and speech-to-speech conversation can not only help consumers access content that is normally unavailable in their language, but also enable disabled consumers who struggle to communicate verbally to create unique AI-generated voices that capture the imperfections and tonality of human speech. As Elevenlabs expands its resources for retail clients, she demonstrated how conversational AI can enhance virtual customer service assistants, enabling them to solve problems for shoppers more efficiently, while offering customers a humanised experience.
The event closed with a conversation between Vogue Business Paris correspondent Laure Guibault and Kering chief innovation officer Grégory Boutté. During the conversation, Boutté spoke with optimism about the consensus at the Paris AI Action Summit, which indicates a willingness for countries to work together on regulation and ethical implementation, but also the ambition to invest in startups and developers. Boutté said that in the early days, Kering’s data science team focused on the supply chain; for example, predictive analytics on production volumes and allocation to prevent excess inventory and a lack of availability while improving the customer experience.
However, Boutté asserted that Kering is selective about where and how AI is used throughout the business. “The way we look at AI is it has to improve the way we work, but we’re clear on where we want to see AI and where we don’t. The reason the luxury business exists is because we make beautiful products, both in terms of creativity and craftsmanship and this is here to stay. Our products are beautiful because they’re designed by a creative team and crafted by artisans,” he said.
On the subject of generative AI, Boutté added: “One of the things we’re really excited about is the aspiration we’re able to create around our campaigns. We’re not using generative AI to do communications. The creativity comes from creative directors and their teams, which are simply irreplaceable, but if we think AI could help them in some time-consuming parts of their creative process, then we will look into that.”
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