TECH UPGRADE: Viva Tech is celebrating its 10^th anniversary with a takeover of the Avenue des Champs-Elysées on June 14.

LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, a founding partner of the annual technology conference, will join in the event with a public activation by Guerlain dedicated to artificial intelligence and content creation. The French beauty brand has had a flagship on the famed thoroughfare since 1913.

In parallel, LVMH is shaking up the format of its stand and Innovation Award at the fair, scheduled to run from June 17 to 20. The LVMH DreamGallery is designed as a unified, immersive experience that will highlight how innovation feeds into every step in the value chain through the example of 10 of its houses.

For example, it will show how Parfums Christian Dior has used AI to reduce water consumption in its rose garden in Normandy by 30 percent. Meanwhile, Celine — which will be present at the fair for the first time — is set to present its retail AI assistant CELIA.

While visitors will need to register to visit the booth, the group will also be present on Viva Tech stages.

LVMH chairman and chief executive officer Bernard Arnault will be among speakers, in conversation with Olympic champion swimmer Leon Marchand, who recently graduated from Arizona State University with a computer science degree.

Instead of hosting one ceremony for the LVMH Innovation Award, the group will hand out one prize a day between June 17 and 19: the Best Impact Award, Most Promising Award and Best Business Award. For the public day on June 20, it will distribute 2,000 free passes to 15- to 30-year-olds to promote young people’s access to technology.

As AI systems play a growing role in product recommendation and purchasing decisions, LVMH has introduced pilot projects such as launching the Sephora U.S. app in ChatGPT.

Gonzague de Pirey, chief omnichannel and data officer at LVMH, said the group is optimizing its sites for search by large language models, but the end objective is driving customers to stores.

“We have beautiful stores in exceptional locations, filled with exceptional works of art and staffed by exceptional people, so it’s about how we tell those stories in the LLMs so that customers who start their journey on LLMs make it to the physical stores,” he told a breakfast meeting in Paris on Monday.

Franck Le Moal, group IT and technology director at LVMH, said that Louis Vuitton will be the next brand to incorporate agentic AI into its chatbot, though he also emphasized human interaction is the end goal. “We’re going to use it as much as possible, but in the end, we want customers to be referred back to a human, whether it’s an agent in a call center or an in-store sales adviser,” he said.