Why AI will never invent the next Birkin

At a recent board meeting in Italy, a CEO posed a question I hear with growing frequency: can artificial intelligence predict the next big trend in luxury handbags? His logic made sense. If we feed an algorithm enough data on colors, shapes, consumer sentiment, and historical sales, surely it could calculate the perfect product. I told him that this was the fastest way to irrelevance. We are currently witnessing a dangerous misunderstanding of what AI actually does. Generative AI is a probability engine. It analyzes the past to predict the most likely continuation of a pattern. It is, by design, a rearview mirror. Luxury, however, is the exact opposite. True luxury does not follow patterns; it breaks them. Luxury is the business of the extraordinary, the unexpected, and the non-linear. I once described luxury as the perpetual business of surprise. If you had asked an algorithm in 1984 to design the ultimate status symbol, it would have analyzed the data of the time and likely suggested a smaller, more efficient briefcase. It would never have suggested the Birkin. The regression to the mean The fundamental risk for luxury brands today is not that they will fail to adopt AI, but that they will adopt it for the wrong things. When we use AI for creative ideation, we are mathematically guiding our brand toward the average. If you ask a model to design a luxury hotel lobby, it will give you a perfectly competent, aesthetically pleasing amalgamation of every luxury lobby that already exists. It will be beautiful. It will be correct. And it will be completely forgettable. This adds to the sea of sameness that most brands are already trapped in. In my audits of luxury brands across Europe and Asia, I often see teams celebrating AI-generated designs that look remarkably professional yet lack any distinct soul. They are efficient, but they are devoid of the friction and the artistic daring that create Added Luxury Value (ALV). If your strategy is to fit in, AI is the perfect tool. If your strategy is to lead, AI is a creative anchor. It’s a dead end. Efficiency vs. seduction We must distinguish between execution and imagination. For execution, AI is a miracle. It can optimize supply chains, personalize website interfaces in real time, and analyze millions of data points to spot micro-shifts in consumer behavior. At Équité, we advise clients to be aggressive in these areas because operational friction is the enemy of premium experiences. But imagination operates differently. Luxury value is psychological. It’s about seduction. Seduction requires empathy, cultural intuition, and the ability to understand the unspoken desires of a client. An algorithm does not feel desire. It does not understand the thrill of the hunt or the irrational joy of owning something rare. When brands try to automate the dreaming phase of their business, they strip away the human element that justifies the price point. A product created by an algorithm has no story. Without a story, there is no extreme value. The human premium This leads to a contrarian conclusion. As AI becomes ubiquitous, the value of raw intelligence drops to zero. Anyone can access the smartest models in the world for a monthly subscription. This means that the IQ of a brand is no longer a competitive advantage. The new premium is EQ, emotional intelligence. The brands that will dominate the next decade will be the ones that use AI to handle the boring, repetitive tasks, freeing up their human talent to do what humans do best: create, disrupt, and connect. I often tell my students at Pepperdine that the role of the luxury manager is shifting. We used to be administrators of excellence. Now, we must be curators of emotion. The mandate for leaders If you are a CEO or creative director, your mandate is clear: do not let your teams use AI as a crutch for creativity. Use it as a relentless auditor of efficiency, but ban it from the room when you are defining the soul of your next collection. The next Birkin, the next iPhone, the next game-changing hospitality concept will not come from a prompt. It will come from a human being who looks at the data, ignores it, and decides to dream something entirely different. Someone who walks through the world with open eyes and who feels. AI can predict the probable. Luxury is about making the impossible come true. This is an opinion piece by Daniel Langer, CEO of Équité, recognized as one of the “Global Top Five Luxury Key Opinion Leaders,” and advisor to some of the most iconic luxury brands in the world. He serves as an executive professor of luxury strategy and pricing at Pepperdine University in Malibu and as a professor of luxury at NYU, New York. Daniel has authored best-selling books on luxury management in English and Chinese, and is a respected global keynote speaker. Daniel conducts in-person masterclasses on various luxury topics across the world. As a luxury expert featured on Bloomberg TV, Forbes, The Economist, and others, Daniel holds an MBA and a Ph.D. in luxury management and has received education from Harvard Business School. Sign up for his online luxury masterclasses at the Jing Academy.

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Why AI will never invent the next Birkin