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Vogue Business and Google invited senior delegates from the Parisian fashion and luxury industries to discuss the challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence. Hosted at Google France’s headquarters, the half-day summit attracted executives from Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Balenciaga, Hugo Boss and Isabel Marant, among others.
Axel De Goursac, director of LVMH Group’s AI Factory, and Joëlle Barral, senior director of research and engineering at Google DeepMind, each spoke to Vogue Business senior innovation editor Maghan McDowell about their work and their goals for AI in fashion. Additionally, Vogue Business Paris correspondent Laure Guilbault spoke one-on-one with the founders of four curated startups who use AI to provide new solutions, and Vogue Business head of advisory Anusha Couttigane shared highlights from a Vogue Business and Google study on the opportunity for AI in luxury.
Key themes of the day included the need to prioritise human intuition and creativity; the need for global consensus on AI regulation, use and standards; and AI for good, in terms of sustainability and reducing waste, more specifically.
DeepMind’s Barral shared how the organisation’s research to determine the structure of proteins, called AlphaFold, could be used to better address plastic waste through upcycling, for example. In the immediate term, she sees opportunities to use generative AI to automate and personalise aspects of customer service, to help generate sketches of ideas and to digest large text documents.
LVMH’s AI Factory assists the group’s multiple brands in testing and using AI, De Goursac said. Already, they use AI to help client advisors identify the most appropriate customers to reach out to, and to add contextual suggestions to client correspondence. Additionally, LVMH brands are using it to better plan inventory, including how much to produce and where to allocate them to reduce the likelihood of unsold product.
Startup founders shared further uses and learnings. Sociate AI CEO and co-founder Yasmin Topia discussed how the startup enables people to shop through more complex and conversational searches that go beyond basic keywords, while Veesual CEO and co-founder Maxime Patte shared that in virtual try-on — where garments are fitted on a customer-provided image — creating the “ideal projection” of each shopper, is more successful than generating something that is a direct photorealistic representation. Faume co-founder Lucas Patricot, meanwhile, shared how the resale-tech company is using AI to navigate the best prices for individual garments, and Euveka CEO and founder Audrey-Laure Bergenthal discussed how the company can fast-track remote fittings using robot mannequins — including a client project to create a custom piece for Beyoncé in just three weeks. Bergenthal also highlighted the importance of women working to develop these projects in helping mitigate bias.
Barral and De Goursac addressed the need for establishing both internal protocols to approach AI, as well as global standards. “It’s really important for the industry to start setting standards that are global and agreed upon broadly. It’s the difference between us being able to exchange emails regardless of the tools we’re using, and having many different ways of exchanging [text messages]; years ago, we agreed on a standard for emails, but not for chats, and it has had very long-lasting consequences.”
Barral shared that Google DeepMind’s core tenant is to produce technology that is beneficial to society, while advising brand executives to establish how they are going to evaluate AI models before they deploy them; including what they want them to achieve and the answers they anticipate, and their ultimate goals, such as whether experiments are intended to scale.
At LVMH’s AI Factory, the team is guided by the goals of enhancing the customer experience and producing exceptional, desirable products through human-first artificial intelligence. To this end, the company is working with Stanford University’s Human-Centred AI Institute, and it has decided that for now, generative AI tools will not be customer facing. Furthermore, the company has developed an internal AI tool and training programmes for employees to learn about how to create prompts and to access information more easily. Brands throughout the group can access and customise algorithms from an in-house library.
De Goursac also emphasised that in the immediate future, traditional data science is more beneficial than the more experimental generative AI uses. In the long term, Barral sees AI know-how as a make-or-break skillset. “I don’t think people appreciate how much it’s going to change things in a 10-year time frame, in the same way that the internet and mobile industries did. People who know how to leverage AI are likely going to replace the ones who don’t. It’s really a tool that is there to augment our creativity.”
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