Dreamforce 25 - why luxury brands can't afford to ignore agentic AI. David Yurman and Breitling testify to new realities in high-end retail

When it comes to digital transformation, the luxury retail space has traditionally been something of a laggard. While other parts of the retail market were hurtling online in a bid to take on ‘The Great Satan’ of Amazon, high-end brands took a distinctly snooty attitude at times. Check this out from 2017 for a feel for the prevailing market mood.

It was, of course, an unsustainable stance to take and one that has gradually eroded over time, boosted perhaps by the pandemic - if you’re unable to leave your homes, then wandering around luxury retail outlets to revel in the ‘experience’ of it all isn’t viable any more!

Will the same ‘denial of reality’ mistake be made with the agentic revolution? At Dreamforce this week, two luxury brands went out their way to make the opposite case, both companies in the high-end jewelry space.

David Yurman

David Yurman is a privately-held jewelry company based in New York. Founded by a sculptor and a painter, the House of Yurman is pitched as “one long art project” by founders David and Sylvia Yurman, veterans of bohemian locations such as New York’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s.

That artistic heritage is mirrored in the firm’s digital and brand identities, according to CTO Christian Fortucci:

Our brand heritage has been so much defined by craftsmanship and personal connection. We see digital as a extension to that philosophy. And while we know that technology is powering this, we want that technology to feel invisible and really create [online] experiences that are thoughtful, curated, and creating the same personal connection that we get with the stores.

To achieve this the firm needs to start with good data, he adds:

We use the data in the background. We also use strong storytelling images and videos to create personal optimization for our customers. That is really about anticipating their needs and creating richer stories for them, and then ultimately creating a moment of discovery for them that is uniquely tailored towards them. And then, of course, we also want to have this human element across the board.

That’s why David Yurman has become an Agentforce user, he says:

We felt like we needed to implement Agentforce as our web chat to ensure that we now have a conversational bot that is really providing the same warmth and precision that you would be getting at our stores. Ultimately, this just becomes about technology as an enabler for that emotional luxury. You have precision under the seams, you have personalization on the surface, and then you create this wonderful experience for the user.

Search displaced?

Salesforce research predicts that this Holiday season over half of product discovery is going to happen on an Large Language Model (LLM). Fortucci concurs that the changed nature of search is a big game changer in retail:

If you look at the old way of searching, of like menu-driven filters, where I'm going to go 'women's bracelets, gold, under $10,000', people no longer want to search that way. Instead, they would rather have it very conversational and coming in and saying, 'Next month, I'm going to a beach wedding. I'm wearing a sleeveless sundress, so I'm looking for a chunky gold bracelet that is under $5,000'.

The bot will go ahead and curate that experience. You can then further refine it, saying, 'You know what, I want something a little bit daintier’, or, ‘Show me some mixed metal options’ and, ‘Let’s go to $7500 now’. That will come through and then you can keep on interacting and interacting. This is really falling into Conversational Commerce. Then how do you complete that transaction? [By] saying, 'Okay, this is the piece of jewelry that I want. Go ahead, add it to my cart and use my credit card on file, and go ahead and complete the purchase’.

This changes the rules of engagement between retailer and consumer, he suggests:

Personalization is always going to be that holy grail. Luxury retailers are always going to want to provide that curated, tailored experience for their brand loyalists. But you really need to start thinking about this agentic world and that there are now these browsers that are really starting to take over. Instead of an individual coming to your website, [customers] are going to be opening up this browser, and they're going to be doing these searches. They’re going to transact there, so you need to make sure that you have an agent on your side that [customers] can communicate with to complete the transaction for you without them ever going to your site.

These agents, of course, need to be designed with care:

The first guiding principle that we had was that we needed it to have this human element, and we needed to have it be very conversational. We knew that we can't put our toe in the water for this. We need the full experience, and that is how we're going to gain the trust. We needed to train the bot to ensure that it's communicating in the brand voice, and so that every interaction feels very authentic in a representation of David Yurman.

To date, customers are responding positively, Fortucci says:

If you look at the key metrics for success, we are seeing higher engagement. We're seeing higher ticket deflection, so we're seeing fewer tickets going over to our human agents. And then the one that we are the most proud of is that we're seeing a higher customer satisfaction, so really positive results that we're seeing across the board here.

He concludes with some advice for other retailers:

You really need to start thinking about generative search optimization and making sure that the LLMs are aware of you and you're being responded to at the top of the list. With that, you need to control the narrative. You need to ensure that the images that are coming across, the links that are coming across -  the romance, the copy the storytelling - that this is all from the brand voice, and it's all coming from David Yurman, and not allowing the LLM to make guesses and assumptions.

So it's really important for organizations to focus on, what is our general research optimization plan? What is our agentic plan? Because that is going to be how many, so many people shop. You're always going to have your brand loyalists that are going to go to your website and want to see all of your products, but otherwise, I think a large majority will go through this browser. You can see a world in the future where maybe there's no UI to your website.

Breitling

It’s a similar story at Breitling, a luxury watchmaker that dates back to Switzerland in 1884. Today it’s one of the last remaining independent Swiss watchmakers as well as a retailer of luxury timepiece brands from companies such as Rolex. CTO Rajesh Shanmugasundaram says:

We recently celebrated 140 years, so we are built on strong heritage, history, innovation and everything..

Over the past five or six years, the firm has been through multiple transformations, although as Shanmugasundaram explains:

I’m talking about more of a brand transformation, a business transformation, than a technology transformation. Breitling used to be an aviation-based watchmaking company. We are not that anymore. We transformed that into a more casual luxury industry. As a brand today, owning a Breitling is not about just status; it is about style and purpose.

And one other important factor to be remembered: 

Our brand is emotionally-based. It's a human connection...buying a watch is an emotional decision.

D2C

As part of the transformations mentioned above, there was a push further into D2C (Direct-to-Consumer) although Shanmugasundaram cautions:

Moving to D2C doesn't mean that you just open a website, you just open an online store and everyone comes in there. That's not a transformation. So we needed to make sure that, from a digital perspective, we transform that end-to-end. So what we did as a first step was we focused more on the customer part of it... We strongly believe we should own our customers, customer segmentation, CRM and everything. Without that, we are not a brand anymore.

What does that mean in practice? Shanmugasundaram explains:

We implemented Salesforce CRM, Service Cloud, and also Marketing Cloud. So we focused a lot on customers first. That's fundamental to transform the brand. What it helps us to do is build a Customer 360 so we're able to provide a much more personalized experience to our all customers.

That needs a strong data foundation to underpin it:

We've invested heavily in the data infrastructure, which means that every single piece of data - my products, my stock, my customer, my interactions, everything - is in one place. We enabled  a GPT-kind of function for our internal users. That empowers everyone to use data-driven decisions where before it was more about emotional-driven decisions.

In fact when it comes to data, he notes:

We have millions of [bits of] data from the offline channel, online channel, Customer Service, Marketing, the contact center. We've got a hell of a lot of data. So what we do? We do AI to segment the data to provide a much better, personalized experience across all our customers and prospects.

Human intelligence 

Given the emphasis on the importance of human intelligence, how does that sit with the artificial variety? Shanmugasundaram says:

We strongly believe AI is not going to replace us as a brand. We are going to probably co-exist. We have a lot of use cases identified in the complete value chain, from Production to Distribution to DTC to Sales to Marketing and the IT Support Center. Some of them are already live; some of them we are still working on.. Two of them, I'm really personally excited about. One, We are actually co-developing with Salesforce, a concept called Predictive Websites. Based on the agents, it actually transforms the way the website works out. It dynamically builds a website based on what customers enters as assistant.

That’s not yet live, but the introduction of AI has delivered some early lessons to pass on to peers. Shanmugasundaram advises:

There are two challenges. It's nothing about the technology. Technology is very easy to solve. Challenge number one is data. When I say data, I'm talking about having the right data, quality data, and data in one single place. I'm not here talking about any technology. I'm talking about please, please spend your time and money to consolidate the data before you even think about AI. If you don't have the data right, it's like having a Ferrari without an engine. You're not going to use it. So that's the first biggest problem. The second - get people's trust, get their buy in. That is not so easy. It comes from the top, from the board all the way to the Sales associates. That's how it works.

As for what’s to come for Breitling, Shanmugasundaram makes it clear that the retailer is committed to an agentic future:

We're talking about being an Agentic Enterprise, starting from production all the way to Customer Service and Finance. There is going to be a lot of agents in every single area. We're going to provide this to every single function across every single employee in Breitling. That’s the way I see it.

My take

Any high end retailer who chooses not to take this on board may well soon find it’s a luxury that they simply can’t afford!

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