LVMH plays the Chinese card. At a time when trade relations with the United States are becoming increasingly complex, luxury group LVMH is highlighting the existence of digital, cloud, and AI alternatives in China to American technological solutions, which have been widely adopted by businesses and individuals in Europe.
LVMH is pursuing a unique path, while other major players—such as banking giant BNP Paribas—have so far avoided entering into agreements with Chinese providers.
An innovation contest for retail held in Shanghai
LVMH, in collaboration with Alibaba Cloud, organized an innovation contest focused on AI agents for retail in Shanghai in mid-March 2025. Chinese generative AI tools were used for the event.
The technical development platform for AI models during the competition was Alibaba Cloud BaiLian. This platform allows companies to create, customize, and deploy AI applications based on large-scale models. The solutions developed during the contest leveraged generative AIs such as Qwen and DeepSeek R1.
Generative AIs from Alibaba and DeepSeek
Qwen is a family of large language models (LLMs) developed by Alibaba Cloud. DeepSeek R1, on the other hand, is a ChatGPT competitor that disrupted the generative AI landscape earlier this year by offering lower pricing and development costs than OpenAI.
During the contest, six teams competed in person and 15 individuals participated online to present their solutions tailored for luxury retail. More than 23,000 people watched the event online, and it garnered significant media attention, according to LVMH.
Creating personalized experiences with AI
LVMH is committed to investing in generative AI.
“We plan to continue working with Alibaba Cloud on data projects to enhance personalization, efficiency, and customer engagemen. With Alibaba Cloud, we see the real potential of AI to transform luxury retail and support our pursuit of personalized customer experiences.”said Franck Le Moal, CIO of LVMH.
LVMH has been working with Alibaba Cloud since 2019.
“It has been essential to our digital and technological transformation in China. Our partnership has evolved from cloud technology to advanced data management, data architecture, and now AI and generative AI.”concluded Franck Le Moal, CIO of LVMH.
Artefact, a French AI consulting group, also contributed to the Shanghai event.
