- Chanel CEO Leena Nair visited Microsoft to discuss AI, she told Stanford’s business school.
- Nair described an awkward interaction with ChatGPT while there.
- Chanel is preparing for AI integration and testing experiments including chatbots, Nair said.
ChatGPT may be one of the major contenders in the AI race, but Chanel CEO Leena Nair was left slightly less than impressed by it during her trip to Microsoft headquarters.
In an interview for Stanford Graduate School of Business’s “View From The Top” speaker series, Nair said that Chanel’s leadership team had traveled to Seattle in May to visit various tech companies and startups to understand how the potential impacts of AI.
“AI is everywhere,” she said. “And it’s going to be transformative in our world, so luxury has to engage with it, Chanel has to engage with it.”
However, when there, she had a “funny” moment with ChatGPT.
“We were in Microsoft and we were playing around with ChatGPT on the premises,” Nair said. “And we’re like, ‘Show us a picture of a senior leadership team from Chanel visiting Microsoft’ — it is all men in suits.”
Nair, previously the first female chief HR officer at Unilever, poked fun at the chatbot’s failure to recognize Chanel’s largely female staff and audience, instead depicting a “100% male team, not even in fashionable clothes.”
“This is Chanel. Yes, 76% of my organization is women, 96% of my clients are women, female CEO,” Nair said.
She added, “This is what you’ve got to offer, ChatGPT? Come on.”
Microsoft, OpenAI, and Chanel did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
While AI has been rapidly developing to become less robotic, with ChatGPT’s latest GPT-o4 model generating more convincingly humanlike responses, Nair said she is still urging tech execs to keep the “integrity” of their work with AI.
“I constantly talk to my friends in tech, all the CEOs that you know, saying, come on, guys, you’ve gotta make sure that you’re integrating a humanistic way of thinking in AI,” she said.
Nair said Chanel is still getting “AI-ready,” including implementing infrastructure systems, data governance classifications, and testing “a lot of experiments.”
“We’re trying little things for productivity, chatbots on chanel.com,” she said.
Nair said the is still keeping a “relentless focus on human creators” and maintaining the “freedom” to innovate for artists and workers.
“I don’t want that ever to go,” she said. “So ensuring that AI supports human creators and creation, rather than take away what they bring so skillfully and masterfully, is very much core to who we are at Chanel.”
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