AI has become the new sales associate of luxury

This article was written by Demi Karanikolaou for WIRED. You can find it here.

“Which trending luxury bag should I buy for under €3,000?” Until recently, for many luxury-conscious consumers, that question might have begun with some Instagram inspiration, continued on Google where one could browse options and pricing with one click, then passed through a dozen TikTok reviews for specific products, before eventually ending up on Net-A-Porter or inside a physical boutique, where a sales associate would try to help you pull the final trigger with excellent storytelling and some much-needed champagne. In 2026, however, the same journey is increasingly likely to take place almost entirely inside an AI chatbot, where there will be an almost instantaneous answer to all of your questions. The new reality of luxury shopping seems to have a new avenue: before the customer has visited a brand website, opened a campaign image or stepped inside a store, an algorithm may have already created a shortlist for them to consider. It might compare Loewe with Bottega Veneta, suggest The Row as a more discreet alternative, explain why Polène feels relevant to aspirational consumers or recommend a resale platform for a discontinued Celine style. In other words, luxury’s newest sales associate may no longer be human.

And while many luxury executives may be tempted to look at this shift as simply another digital touchpoint, the change seems to cut much deeper, posing a larger question: is this merely a shift in the technological tools brands need, or a shift in who gets to create desire? For the last decade, every stage of the luxury customer journey had its own dedicated channel: visual seduction for Instagram, searchable authority for Google, seamless storytelling for e-commerce and, finally, human intimacy inside the boutique. AI complicates that architecture because it does not simply show the customer a campaign or a product page. Instead, it interprets the brand on behalf of the customer, often working from the preferences, questions and anxieties already revealed inside the prompt. It decides which names belong in the answer, which bags are worth comparing, which maison is “timeless”, which one is “trending”, which one offers better value and which one best matches what the customer says they want. This is precisely why the luxury industry is now faced with a larger question: should brands compete for algorithmic relevance as aggressively as they compete for cultural relevance? Increasingly, the answer appears to be yes. If AI becomes one of the places where consumers discover, compare and validate luxury purchases, then the battle for desirability no longer happens only on a runway streamed across social media, inside a campaign or within the flagship store. Increasingly, it also happens inside the answer.

And this shift is no longer hypothetical. The recent BoF and McKinsey report, The State of Fashion: Face to Face With Luxury Clients, names AI as an emerging part of the luxury shopping journey. Based on a survey of more than 2,000 luxury clients in the US and China, the report found that consumers are already using AI to discover products, understand differences in quality and materials, compare options and receive personalised recommendations. In China specifically, one of the most important markets for the luxury industry, around 60 percent of clients who use AI for luxury shopping reported that they use it primarily to explore products, while aspirational customers appear to be using AI most broadly across the shopping journey. For an industry that has historically relied on mystery, emotional storytelling and the extremely important authority of the sales associate, this is not a small behavioural change. It suggests that the luxury customer is no longer being educated only by influencers, campaigns or magazines, but increasingly by an aggregation of all of them, filtered through an AI platform.

What makes this shift particularly fascinating is that AI is not necessarily replacing the romance of luxury with cold functionality. Instead, it is entering luxury at the exact moment where desire asks to be justified. A customer may still fall in love with a bag because of an image, a celebrity or an aspirational moment. But before spending €2,000, €5,000 or €10,000, they increasingly want confirmation: Is the leather durable? Is the silhouette timeless? Is the brand overexposed? Does the product hold value on resale? Is there another option that signals the same taste with less obvious branding? These are precisely the kinds of questions AI is designed to answer quickly, confidently and comparatively. In that sense, the chatbot does not destroy the romance of luxury. It inserts itself between romance and purchase, translating desire into justification.

Some of the industry’s biggest groups already seem to understand that this new layer of discovery will have to be actively managed. L’Oréal, sitting at the intersection of beauty, luxury and technology, has become one of the clearest examples. The same BoF and McKinsey report notes that the group is investing heavily in content and data infrastructure to boost visibility in AI-driven environments, moving from traditional search optimisation to AI-mediated discovery. More recently, L’Oréal and OpenAI announced a collaboration designed to strengthen product discovery inside ChatGPT for brands including Lancôme, Kérastase, La Roche-Posay and Maybelline, while also exploring AI-powered beauty experiences such as virtual try-on. The implication is, of course, that the next generation of digital strategy will not only be about what a customer sees, but also about what an AI assistant understands, compares and recommends.

For luxury brands, this means that digital visibility is becoming more technical, more semantic and, perhaps, less glamorous than a campaign shot by Mert and Marcus. Optimising for AI does not simply mean posting more often or buying more ads. It means ensuring that a brand’s products, values, materials, reviews, editorials, resale presence and cultural codes are legible to the systems that increasingly organise consumer knowledge. The product catalogue becomes a new form of media. A bag is no longer only an image, a price and a fantasy. It is also data: material, dimensions, provenance, availability, reviews, resale value and the language that allows an AI assistant to understand where it belongs in a customer’s search.

This is where luxury faces its most delicate challenge. The industry has always been brilliant at creating atmosphere, but AI rewards clarity. A maison can spend decades building a universe around craft, heritage or discretion, only for a chatbot to flatten it into “good quality, expensive, minimalist.” The next big question for luxury executives is no longer only whether their brand appears in an AI-generated answer, but whether it is understood correctly when it does. The future of luxury is not a world without boutiques, campaigns, sales associates or champagne. It is a world where all of them must coexist with a new, invisible layer of influence: the machine that helps decide which brands enter the customer’s imagination before desire even has the chance to become a purchase.