AI steps out with LVMH awards for 3 innovative luxury retail startups

LVMH announced the winners of its ninth Innovation Award during Paris‘s Viva Tech conference, recognizing three AI-powered startups for solutions developed within the luxury conglomerate’s ecosystem. The awards highlight how artificial intelligence is transforming luxury retail through hyper-personalization, content creation efficiency, and sustainability initiatives, with companies like L’Oréal simultaneously announcing major AI partnerships with NVIDIA.

What you should know: This year’s competition focused specifically on projects with measurable ROI within LVMH’s brand portfolio, marking a shift toward more business-focused innovation.

• Best Business Prize went to US-based Kahoona for its collaboration with Dior, delivering real-time predictive audience segmentation that “took personalized customer experience to an unprecedented level.”
• Best Impact Prize was awarded to French startup Genesis for its Moët Hennessy partnership, creating a data-driven tool to measure and improve soil health.
• Most Promising Prize went to OMI for its Guerlain collaboration, described as a “French pioneer in 3D AI” that creates high-quality visuals from 3D models more efficiently and cost-effectively.

How Kahoona’s AI works: CEO Gal Rapoport explained that the technology uses “pattern recognition” to analyze customer intent, demographics, and price points through “digital body language and actioning these insights to route and optimize every customer journey.”

In plain English: Kahoona’s AI watches how people behave on websites—what they click, how long they look at products, where they navigate—then uses that digital behavior to predict what customers want and automatically guide them toward the most relevant products or experiences.

Why AI content creation is king: L’Oréal, the French cosmetics giant, announced its collaboration with NVIDIA during VivaTech “to unlock AI’s potential across multiple aspects of beauty,” leveraging the NVIDIA AI Enterprise platform for rapid AI development and deployment.

• The partnership will scale 3D digital product rendering alongside “personalized marketing and advertising that improve consumer engagement and conversion.”
• Louis Vuitton showcased a proprietary generative AI content creation tool from Paris-based studio Ok C’est Cool, which uses LoRA (low-rank adaptation) to reproduce ultra-specific brand details and textures.
• The tool can generate dozens of images in one day while maintaining “extreme fidelity” to brand standards, working with pre-existing 3D modeled images to create campaign variations.

The big picture: Multiple LVMH brands demonstrated AI implementations beyond content creation, including Louis Vuitton’s partnership with 3D scanning specialist Rigsters and Rimowa’s collaboration with Solaya on 2D and 3D content for pre-loved luggage.

• Bulgari partnered with Italian outfit Maize to develop bespoke educational and conversational AI solutions that maintain “tone of voice integrity across all mediums of communication.”
• The solutions emphasize data sovereignty, with Ok C’est Cool co-founder Marc Horgues noting that internalized AI tools are “paramount to preserve sovereignty of data.”

What they’re saying: “While open source technology has democratised more rudimentary content reproduction, anything produced by LVMH must go above and beyond to conform to the standard of excellence demanded by the luxury Group,” said Ok C’est Cool co-founder Marc Horgues.