LVMH has just revealed the 18 startups shortlisted to compete in the 6th edition of its LVMH Innovation Award Grand Prix at Salon Vivatech, to be held from May 22 to 25, 2024. This 2024 vintage promises to crown talents and solutions focused on two major business challenges for the number one in luxury goods: data and artificial intelligence, including generative intelligence.
Salon Vivatech offers a prime showcase for the place of technological innovation within the LVMH Group, as well as an incomparable pool of tech talent.
Europe’s largest Salon dedicated to innovation and the startup ecosystem, co-created by LVMH with Maurice Lévy in 2016, presents its share of discoveries and highlights. The Innovation Awards ceremony is unquestionably one of them. The LVMH Innovation Award reflect two key values of the luxury group and its Houses: innovation and entrepreneurship. They are a key lever for the group’s excellence.
Each category will reward a single startup, while a special prize will be awarded to a startup for its work related to Data, AI and generative AI. Among the winners, a single startup will also be chosen as the overall winner of the LVMH Innovation Award 2024, presented by Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH.
Data and AI in force
For a global group like LVMH, getting to know its customers and talents better has become a key challenge. Its duty to excel meansanticipating customerdesires in order to design experiences that are ever more individualized, personalized and reproducible, whatever the channel, context or region. This luxury promise of rarity, high quality and emotion meets two challenges that can be met through better management of data and artificial intelligence: enriching the experience, reinforcing the brand image and optimizing operations. On this last point, only the use of precision technology can measure the efforts made and enable a player like LVMH to remain at the forefront of environmental and diversity initiatives.
Artificial intelligence has been used for many years within the group’s Houses, in particular to facilitate sales forecasting and cross-selling. What is new, however, and has gained unprecedented momentum in civil society and many companies, is the use of so-called “generative” artificial intelligence.
A technology that has been on the rise since last year, generative artificial intelligence can generate text (Chat Gpt), images (Midjourney, Dall-E, Stable Diffusion…) and now video (Sora) and music. Seen as a creativity stimulator, it can speed up content production and automate certain tasks. However, this generative AI is not only revolutionizing the creative process: it is also transforming the business model and organization.
Guerlain, for example, was one of the companies showcased at Vivatech 2023, where it created “Born in 1853: Made for the future” using over 1,800 technology-generated images. This film about the bee bottle took viewers on a real journey through time, through aesthetics reflecting different artistic movements.
However, this generative AI is not without its questions of authenticity, aesthetics – particularly with its imperfections and other oddities (hallucinations) – data confidentiality and ethics. Far from replacing humans, these technologies are seen by the Group as a means of augmenting employees. Aware of the stakes, in autumn 2023 the LVMH Group signed a partnership with Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute to build a human-centered AI.
The candidates still in the running for the Innovation Award reflect these different business and industry issues.
These themes will also be covered by the Group’s 12 Houses, which will be exhibiting their latest innovations on the LVMH stand at the Vivatech trade show: Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior Couture, Parfums Christian Dior, Sephora, Loro Piana, Rimowa, Tiffany & Co, Tag Heuer, Hennessy, Ruinart, Guerlain and Bulgari.
A dream come true
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Featured Photo: Jury for the LVMH Innovation Award with the 2023 winning startup, Save Your Wardrobe © DR/LVMH
