Who speaks for your brand when a customer asks an AI?

Who speaks for your brand when a customer asks an AI?

I tried it today with one question: an understated dinner in Milan, and where can I try it on?

Right now a brand has four options.

1. Rent the voice. Prada now has its own app inside ChatGPT. It shows Prada’s pictures, prices and store finder, but ChatGPT does the talking: the same assistant for every brand in there. You’re where everyone is, but you don’t get to speak for yourself.

2. Rent the room. China worked this out in 2017. Tmall’s Luxury Pavilion put the houses where everyone already shopped and let them run their own storefronts: the look, the content, the pricing. Closer, but it’s still someone else’s screen.

3. Build your own front door. Brunello Cucinelli rebuilt its site on Callimacus, an AI platform from Solomei AI, a company the group set up. It speaks in the house’s own voice, and it’s beautiful. But people have to know to come looking, and it never told me where to try anything on.

4. Let your stores teach it. Give every store an AI of its own: an open source model on a small box in the back room. Each night it reads what that store recorded and writes the manager a note before opening. Only what it found travels to a mothership, so every new store opens knowing what the others found.

The first three are about the screen, and none of them got me into a room. The fourth starts from the room: the one place a brand still controls everything, voice included.

Walter Benjamin saw this in 1935: even the most perfect reproduction lacks one thing, “its presence in time and space.” That’s the store.

We call it Mothership. It’s our design research, unbuilt, and we’d build it with you.

Which of the four is your brand doing? Let’s talk.