There is a thought experiment that circulates quietly among people who study the future of retail. If physical stores keep shrinking in number as e-commerce eats the world, what is the last store still standing? For Michael Burke, who ran Louis Vuitton for more than a decade, the answer was obvious: it would be a Louis Vuitton store. Because even in a world where people buy everything else from a screen, there would always be a category of goods worth leaving home for.

Anish Melwani, former chairman and CEO of LVMH’s North America, borrowed that idea and adapted it to the present moment. If AI and virtual agents eventually replace most customer service roles, the last human customer service agent will probably work for LVMH. The reasoning is that human connection is becoming a luxury and the luxury industry, almost by definition, will be the last to let it go.

That single observation, made during a recent on-stage conversation at the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) Big Show Asia Pacific in Singapore on Tuesday captures the essence of Melwani’s thinking across a decade at the helm of one of the most complex brand portfolios in commercial history. His tenure at LVMH spanned the e-commerce debate of 2016, the pandemic shock of 2020, the NFT frenzy of 2021, and the current scramble to understand what machine intelligence actually means for selling things to people.

The architecture of accountability

Before discussing any of it, it helps to understand how LVMH actually works because the structure of the company explains much of its resilience. Most organisations of comparable scale would consolidate functions relentlessly: shared HR, centralised IT, combined marketing. LVMH does almost the opposite. Every maison has its own CEO, its own CFO, its own human resources lead, and in many cases its own technology infrastructure and headquarters.

“It took me a while to understand it, but I eventually figured out that one of the secrets of LVMH’s success is that they sacrifice some efficiency for true accountability. By having each maison led by its own CEO and CFO, people feel like they work first for the maison and then for LVMH,” he said. 

“That matters because when you have some maisons generating many billions in revenue and others that are much smaller, if people were only focused on the overall numbers and the stock price, they would never go to work.”

Emilio Pucci, to use his example, will never move the needle on LVMH’s overall revenue, even if it quadruples in size. But it is still a brand with a distinct heritage, a loyal audience, and creative relevance. If its team were motivated primarily by group targets, they would lose the will to do the patient, painstaking work that keeps a niche luxury brand alive.

This logic also shaped how Melwani approached his role as the corporate layer above the maisons. He could not tell them what to do. They did not report to him. And even if they had, he knew from experience that the surest way to kill an idea was to arrive with it from corporate. 

“So what I found was that by creating sessions where we brought in people from outside the company and exposed leaders from different maisons to innovation, you would naturally see which leaders gravitated toward which partners, providers, or ideas. Then it became their idea. And that was critical. Because when it became their idea, they would actually execute on it,” he said. 

Melwani framed this with characteristic self-deprecation: “For the last ten years, I never had a single good idea. My job was to have bad ideas.” If a partnership turned out badly, the fault was his. If it succeeded, he was invisible. That was the point.

Technology behind the curtain

The most substantive part of Melwani’s retail analysis concerns where technology actually adds value in luxury and where it does not. The lesson from the last decade, he argues, is not that luxury should avoid technology. It is that visible technology rarely works. 

“If we go back to 2016, there was this whole idea that we needed to bring technology into stores. Some people may remember magic mirrors, smart fitting rooms, and all sorts of concepts, but they don’t remember ever going into a store where all of the magic mirrors were actually working. We played around with some of that as well. Sephora did use mirrors, but they also had screens that allowed virtual try-ons, so customers could see how a lipstick shade would look on their face. It worked better at Sephora than it did in luxury,” he said. 

“But the reality is that a lot of it was technology for technology’s sake. And that’s okay. That’s how technology cycles work. You have to try new things. Technologists have to tell you that everything is going to move in a certain direction. They don’t actually know, but they raise money, so they have to say that.”

He cited one example that has since been discussed more broadly within the industry: a maison that reduced the number of screens a customer service agent could manage simultaneously from 8 to 3. That reduction, achieved through AI consolidating backend systems, changed the entire character of the conversation. Agents stopped frantically navigating interfaces and started actually talking to clients. They could identify a repair enquiry, check order status, and pivot to a recommendation within a single, uninterrupted exchange. Conversion rates improved. Not because customers were being sold to more aggressively, but because the people serving them were present in the conversation.

“But the customer interaction remains fundamentally human. In luxury, that’s where I think the industry is headed. We’re likely to see much more invisible technology that empowers people, rather than visible retail technology that’s front and centre,” he added. 

Desire, not demand

Perhaps the most intellectually sharp section of Melwani’s conversation concerned the distinction between demand and desire – a distinction that Bernard Arnault, LVMH’s founder and executive chairman, has long drawn for his own teams.

According to him, consumer goods companies conduct customer surveys. They identify unmet needs. They build products to satisfy those needs. That is demand management. Luxury brands do not operate that way. Creative teams go into the archives. They study the cultural moment. They build things nobody asked for, that nobody had seen the day before, but that some segment of the market decides it cannot imagine living without. That is desire.

The distinction matters enormously for strategy. Desire requires cultural connection. If a brand’s products feel disconnected from the time and place in which they are sold, desire collapses, no matter how strong the heritage. This is why luxury brands invest in creative directors, in cultural touchpoints, in collaborations with artists, musicians, athletes, and entertainers. Not to manufacture demand, but to keep the brand alive within the living culture of its audience.

And yet, Melwani flagged something he is watching carefully as a potential headwind: cultural fragmentation.

“If we don’t consume the same entertainment, read the same magazines, listen to the same podcasts, or watch the same series, then if I see something on a particular show or from a particular celebrity and you’ve never seen it, we can’t have that shared moment of connection and cultural desirability,” he said. 

“As it is now – and I can’t speak for Asia – but in the US, my wife and I will go out to dinner with three other couples, and we struggle to find something that all of us have watched because everything is so fragmented. There was a time, back in the early Instagram days around 2015 or 2016, when a meme would appear on Instagram and pretty much everybody you knew had seen it. You could talk about that meme, and everybody would understand the reference. Today, we don’t see the same memes anymore.”

“I think there is a risk for luxury in over-personalisation because you lose those elements of shared culture that help create common desirability.

Asia as the proving ground

Throughout the conversation, Melwani kept returning to Asia as the place where both digital and physical retail innovation is furthest ahead. Not as flattery, but as a factual observation. American retailers are still working out whether livestream commerce is viable. In China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia, it has been scaled and refined for years.

More striking, he noted, is that in some of the world’s most digitally connected markets, investment in physical retail experience is actually accelerating, not declining. Asian luxury department stores are the ones that colleagues in Paris cite as examples of what’s possible. The digital infrastructure does not replace the stores; it raises the stakes for them.

He also pointed to the quality of creative ambition in the region. The Louis Vuitton vessel installation in Shanghai, a full ship concept that followed the famous trunk installations on the Champs-Élysées and Fifth Avenue, represented a scale of creative vision that surprised even people inside the company. Something about the market environment, Melwani suggested, encourages creatives to propose bolder ideas and then find a way to realise them.

His closing observation on Asia was forward-looking and pointed. Walking through the venue, he passed a Lao Pu Gold store. If that store is indeed the brand’s first outside Mainland China, it is an early signal of something larger. In five to ten years, Melwani expects to see more luxury brands from outside Europe competing on the global stage alongside the heritage houses. The assumption that luxury is inherently European is, quietly, beginning to be tested.

Further reading: Day two at NRF’s big show: Ralph Lauren and Sephora talk AI and taking risks.