In luxury retail, the most valuable asset isn’t the inventory.
It’s memory.
Walk into a boutique, and a great associate remembers that you’re a 38 in tailored jackets but a 40 in coats. They know you hate heavy fragrances. They know context.
Go online, and that same brand treats you like a stranger interacting with a database.
For years, luxury e-commerce has lived a split reality: physical boutiques that convert at 20-40% and websites that struggle to reach a fraction of that because they behave like search engines, not advisors.
We built Alhena.ai to bridge that gap, and luxury brands are waking up to it..
Glossy just published a deep dive on how we are engineering “Taste” into LLMs. The part that matters most isn’t the UI. It’s the operating model:
1. Run AI like a new store: discipline, merchandising, and a clear service philosophy.
2. Define “taste” explicitly (fit guidance, shade guidance, when to recommend a set vs a single SKU).
3. Agentic Checkout: Closing the sale inside the conversation (product cards + agentic checkout) reduces the “context switching tax” that kills momentum online.
The future version of this, IMO, looks less like “a bot on a website”… and more like a client book that spans touchpoints and remembers patterns.
If you’re a CMO / eCom lead: what’s your plan to operationalize taste digitally (not just “add AI”)?
(Glossy link in comments)