The Art of Slowing Down
215: Gucci’s AI Experiment Is What Happens When Luxury Forgets It’s Luxury
“Quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten”. – Aldo Gucci
Unless you live under a rock, you’re aware that there have been several “AI” doomsday articles that have come out over the past few weeks. Yesterday, a research note from Citrini Research stoked a fresh wave of market volatility by warning that rapid AI advances could displace significant numbers of white-collar jobs and undermine consumption-driven economies, triggering a sharp selloff in tech and software stocks.
AI companies like OpenAI have recently partnered with major consulting firms, McKinsey, BCG, Accenture, and Capgemini, to accelerate adoption of its new Frontier AI agent platform in large enterprises (I’m sure their clients will love this). The consultancies will help clients redesign workflows, integrate AI agents into existing systems, and manage organizational change, effectively acting as distribution and implementation partners as OpenAI pushes deeper into the enterprise software stack.
Frontier is positioned as a cross-enterprise layer that lets AI agents operate across core business systems, a move that directly challenges both Anthropic’s growing enterprise footprint and traditional SaaS vendors like Salesforce, Workday, Microsoft, and ServiceNow. With consultants now actively promoting OpenAI’s platform at the C-suite level, investors are increasingly worried that AI agent platforms, and even in-house AI-built software, could erode demand for conventional enterprise software and disrupt long-standing relationships between SaaS vendors and systems integrators.
I’ve written extensively about why I think companies should do appropriate due diligence on AI platforms before investing or deploying them.
One very shocking development that could fit into the “poor use case for AI” bucket are luxury brands such as Gucci using AI to make ads.
To address the Gucci situation before I get into the use of AI in the luxury space, my theory is simple. One of the first things Luca de Meo did when he took over at Kering was appoint Bain and The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to analyze the company’s brands. This is very unlike De Meo based on conversations I had with his former colleagues and peers, so I was a bit surprised.
BCG in particular has essentially put the consulting industry and their clients “on notice” to the fact that they are going to push generative AI within the firm and on clients like a duck is put through gavage (force fed) to make foie gras. It has gotten so absurd that I am actually pushed ads from BCG that are (very unrealistic) “day in the life videos” of employees working at the firm and the romanticized use of generative AI.
I have been consistently critical, in a constructive way, of MBB (McKinsey, Bain and BCG) to the point where I believe BCG actually blocked me on social media (lol) and I’m fairly sure they pushed their Marketing & Sales AI capabilities to Kering which has resulted in whatever the fuck this Gucci campaign is. In my opinion one of the posts looks like something out of the next Grand Theft Auto video game and the other just begs the question “why?”, however BCG’s website does make some pretty bold claims about their “Client Work in Marketing & Sales”.
If these metrics are accurate (I think it’s important to dig into the semantics since this is also a sales pitch), this would be great for many of Kering’s brands, specifically Gucci. That said I don’t think this will be the case and here’s why.
If you recall I had written a post a few weeks ago:
In this piece I highlighted that authenticity is extremely important with a Harvard Business Review write up from December 8th, 2025 titled “How to Do Influencer Marketing That Customers Actually Trust” stating that 88% of customers say that authenticity matters.
The issue with Gucci’s