全球奢侈品：人工智能悖论

Global Luxury Goods: The Artificial Intelligence Paradox Luxury goods companies are selling craftsmanship, creativity and exclusivity. An overt andenthusiastic adoption of artificial intelligence puts their core promise and credibility at risk.Nevertheless, we are seeing major new developments that investors should be aware of.The path to success is more in the ability to capture data and structure internal processes -where 80% of the value would be created - rather than in the algorithms, which would be Luca Solca+41 582 723 126luca.solca@bernsteinsg.com Maria Meita+44 20 7170 0540maria.meita@bernsteinsg.comEric Chen, CFA+852 2123 2628eric.chen@bernsteinsg.com Back office problems have been the first step for artificial intelligence applicationsin fashion and luxury goods. The fashion and luxury goods industry faces highlycomplicated (but not conceptually difficult) supply chain optimization problems when itcomes to inventory planning, deployment, and replenishment (see Global Luxury Goods:Getting Smarter... the Artificial Intelligence Opportunity). Large brands have severalhundred directly operated stores, located across multiple customs regimes, and manythousand SKUs. Before artificial intelligence, these problems had been tackled with linear Yi-Peng Khoo, CFA+44 20 7676 6822yi-peng.khoo@bernsteinsg.comSpecialist Sales Alix Turner+44 20 7762 4044alix.turner@bernsteinsg.com A second wave of artificial intelligence applications has developed to support therise of online sales - with a major boost through the Covid-19 pandemic(see GlobalLuxury Goods: Strategic implications of the "digital revolution"). The idea here has beento provide personalized navigation and suggestions based on browsing history, as wellas to allow consumers to find products on the back of searching for images rather than A major threshold was broken by introducing artificial intelligence at the interfacewith the customer, serving as “digital sales assistant”.This has gone from stylingassistants suggesting how to mix and match different products, as well as chatbotsanswering questions, virtual try-on applications - both in store (through “intelligent mirrors”)and online. The introduction of AI at the customer interface marks a shift from assistedselling to AI-mediated journeys, where discovery, consideration, and transaction can Continued on the next page… … continued from the first page The next step (which is in progress) is to bring artificial intelligence at the core of the4Ps of client facing marketing. •Consumer CRM and dialogue.AI models can produce and sustain a relevant dialoguewith consumers, replacing / supporting human intervention and massively expandingthe number of people receiving personalized treatment. For both online and in-store experience, AI models can help design customer-centric layouts and visual •Marketing communication.AI models can generate high-grade quality contentfor social media and communication at scale, with natural sounding translation forlocalization. Internally, AI models can also help dynamically optimize marketing spendallocation across regions and channels based on real-time performance data (see Global •Collection articulation and merchandising.AI models can start from core creativeinputs and “fill the gaps” in a collection, speeding and supporting key merchandising •Pricing and yield management.AI models can dynamically manage pricing and yieldmanagement decisions, on the back of sales velocity by SKU/ store (see Global Luxury A future step is for artificial intelligence to allow experimentation and “in vitro” testing:Creating a parallel environment for brands to test alternative marketing choices,see how they would work, and choose accordingly. Including choices directly generatedby the AI algorithms. Additional areas could include product authentication and fraud Companies nevertheless have a choice between buying artificial intelligencesolutions from software vendors vs. developing their own.Make, as opposed to buy,decisions are preferred for core processes and seem to be the way forward on agentic AI.Companies tempted to lean on off-the-shelf providers given the high pace of AI technologydevelopment may find themselves far behind peers in essential know-how once we reach A diverse ecosystem of players is emerging, spanning multidisciplinary platformsand highly specialized solutions, most of which are built on GenAI capabilities enabledby big tech players (e.g., OpenAI, Google). For luxury brands, competitive advantage willincreasingly depend on how effectively they orchestrate partnerships and co-developtailored, luxury-first solutions within this ecosystem, rather than relying on standalone BERNSTEIN TICKER TABLE INVESTMENT IMPLICATIONS AI offers meaningful efficiency gains for luxury brands but also introduces brand equity risks if not implemented carefully.Enhancements in backoffice and supply chain efficiency, design and merchandising, marketing, and customer relat