Leena Nair, CEO of Chanel, recently shared her insights on the impact of AI in the luxury sector. During an interview with Stanford Graduate School of Business’s “View From The Top,” one of the questions asked to the CEO was on how “Chanel is adopting recent changes in AI and robotics.”
On this, Nair replied, “AI is everywhere and it is going to be transformative in our world, so luxury has to engage with it, Chanel has to engage with it as all others.”
Sharing her experience, she said, “In fact, our leadership team and I travelled to Seatle in May, and we met a whole lot of people. We visited Microsoft, Google, and many of the startups in the area, and spent some time with ChatGPT, because we wanted to understand how it impacts us.”
She emphasized that “I do think number one in my mind is to keep a relentless focus on human creation. I don’t that ever to go. So ensuring that AI supports human creators and creations rather than taking away what they bring, so skillfully and masterfully core to who we are at Chanel.”
“We are also high on ethics and integrity, so we want to do it in the right way.”
Sharing a funny incident, she further said, “We were at Microsoft, we were playing around with ChatGPT on the premises. And we are like, show us a picture of a senior leadership team from Chanel visiting Microsoft.” To her surprise, she said, “It is all men in suits.”
She said, “This is Chanel. Yes, 76 per cent of my organisation is women, and 96 per cent of my clients are women, female CEO. It is a 100 per cent male team, not even in fashionable clothes.”
“This is what you’ve got to offer, ChatGPT? Come on.” In the end, she concluded, “So, it’s so important that we keep the ethics and integrity of what we are doing with AI.”