After more than a decade at Richemont, Pedro López-Belmonte has a direct view of where luxury brands continue to struggle with technology, ecommerce, and digital identity. Now as Chief Product Officer at VersAI, he argues that the future of luxury commerce depends less on new tools and more on whether brands can remove friction, unify experiences, and earn client trust.
Luxury People Magazine: After 12 years at Richemont leading innovation initiatives, what lessons did you take from working inside one of the world’s largest luxury groups, and how did that experience shape the way you approach technology and product strategy today?
Pedro López-Belmonte: Twelve years inside Richemont Group taught me three things that still guide everything I do today.
The first, and most important, is that luxury is about people on both sides of the counter. Brands talk constantly about clients, but their retail teams are the ones carrying the brand into every interaction. And these retail teams often know more about what clients actually want than most decks I have ever seen. When I travelled, I always blocked time to visit one or two boutiques from the Group. I wanted to learn about their daily activities, their needs, and problems. That habit gave me invaluable insight.
It also gave me the key to adoption: brands do not decide adoption. Clients do. A product, whether it is a watch or a piece of software, only works when it fulfils a need the client already has, or delivers something they want. If you build something the brand needs, you get a launch. If you build something the client needs, you get adoption.
The second lesson is that alignment inside a large group is the hardest part of innovation. Anyone who has worked in a holding the size of Richemont knows that technology is rarely the obstacle. The obstacle is getting the different functions and the brands themselves around the same table with a shared definition of the problem. The job of an innovation leader is not to bring the smartest idea. It is to find the common ground between client needs and company goals, and to translate it into terms that each team can act on. Alignment is slow and almost never glamorous, and it is also the only thing that turns a pilot into a programme.
The third lesson is about clarity, simplicity, and purpose. With technology, especially, complexity multiplies fast, and every layer that does not directly serve the client or the staff is a cost the brand absorbs. Luxury cannot afford that cost.
From those three lessons, three rules guide every technology decision I make today. First, technology must disappear into the experience. The moment a client feels friction, the technology has already failed. Nobody opens another app, scans another code, or logs into another portal unless the value is immediate and clear.
Second, the technology supporting any client experience must be aligned across the organisation, and above all with the sales team. If the sales team does not own it, does not believe in it, and does not embed it in their daily ceremonies, they will not put it in front of clients. And if they do not, no one will.
Third, people’s fundamental needs do not change. What changes is the way we approach them, and technology plays a central role in that shift. Think about why Uber became so successful. They did not invent the taxi service. They built on it, solving a handful of friction points: cost predictability, route visibility, quality, and feedback. That is why adoption was so fast. Digital Product Passports are another example. In essence, they are the evolution of the paper certificate of authenticity for high-end products. But we rushed to wrap them in digital cards and NFC taps, then wondered why clients were not using them. Clients never came back to a paper certificate either. They came back to the product.
Clients are not waiting for our technology. We have to earn their attention and blend the technology into the experience.
LPM: You have been working closely on Digital Product Passports and digital product identity. From a luxury perspective, how do you see these tools influencing authenticity, resale, and long-term brand trust?
PLB: The Digital Product Passport is moving from a compliance checkbox to a piece of business infrastructure, but most brands are not treating it that way yet. The European regulation is pushing brands to comply, and right now, most teams read the DPP as a cost line. That is the first mistake.
A DPP is the digital twin of a product. It carries its genealogy, its materials, its repair history, and its journey through owners. It is also alive. Unlike a paper certificate, it evolves with the product. That changes everything for authenticity, for resale, and for the relationship a brand can sustain with a client years after the purchase.
We explored this at Richemont four or five years ago, looking at loyalty and engagement, access, and rewards built on top of product identity. The opportunity is visible. The blocker is interoperability. None of this scales until the industry agrees on a few common elements, and brands are not yet ready for that conversation. The reason is simple. They are approaching the DPP from a brand-first perspective rather than a client-first one.
It shows up everywhere. Brands want the DPP inside their own walled garden, accessible only through their own app, formatted in their own way, exposing only the data they choose. The intent is to keep control. But an excess of control will choke the impact of the DPP beyond compliance. The drive for control creates silos, and silos prevent both adoption and ecosystem development. Without an ecosystem, services like resale, authentication, repair, and insurance never reach the scale where they matter.
The path forward is open standards. When the industry aligns on common standards for product identity, three things happen at once. Authentication becomes verifiable across the value chain, which means a watch sold on a resale platform can be trusted instantly, by any buyer, anywhere. Trust at that level lifts resale value, and a brand whose products hold value over time gains a different kind of desirability, the one that justifies the original purchase. The resale market stops being a threat. It becomes a continuation of the brand experience.
Brands gain on the other side, too. When the DPP is open, third party services plug in: repair networks, insurance providers, authentication marketplaces, lifecycle services. Each of those interactions generates a signal back to the brand about how clients actually use their products. Today, most brands lose visibility the moment a product leaves the boutique. With an open DPP, they keep that thread alive for years, and they learn more about their clients than any survey could ever tell them. That’s adoption, but also efficiency and brand-client relationship.
Here is my read. A few brands will move first. They will design the DPP as the spine of a lasting client relationship rather than as a regulatory line item, and they will do it by starting from the client. That choice will pull them towards open standards, because that is the only architecture that puts the client at the centre and makes the DPP useful enough for clients to return to over time. Clients will adopt it quickly because it gives them ownership over their products in a way they have never had before. They will be able to verify, transfer, repair, insure, and resell with confidence, all from a single source of truth that follows the product, not the brand. Everyone else will be forced to follow.
The brands that win will understand early that the DPP is not a label. It is the operating layer that carries the relationship long after the product leaves the boutique, telling its story as it unfolds.
LPM: As Chief Product Officer for VersAI, you are focusing on Agentic Commerce. For luxury brands that traditionally value control and exclusivity, what opportunities and risks do you see when AI agents begin to act on behalf of consumers in online commerce?
PLB: Luxury has not solved digital commerce. Look at the numbers. Online generates around 20% of revenue across luxury as an average (30% in beauty and only 5% in high-end watches). Cart abandonment sits at 75%. The volume of clients who never make it to a cart is even higher. That is not a problem of demand. It is a problem of experience.
Online stores are mostly shoppable catalogues. Beautiful in most cases, but catalogues nonetheless. The experience they offer is very similar to the old paper catalogue shopping, when a client called a number, placed an order, and waited a few days for delivery. They are very transactional, the opposite of the experience you can find in many luxury boutiques. Brands have optimised relentlessly for online conversion and ended up in a pool of sameness, where a luxury maison and a mass market retailer share the same menu structure, the same product page, and the same checkout pattern in their online store. There is no brand left in the experience.
Agentic commerce is the chance for brands to take back the narrative. For years, the digital path has been shaped by the platform, the search engine, the comparison site, and the algorithm. The brand was a passenger on its own channel. An agent built by the brand changes that, as they enable brands to speak, listen, and guide the client with full command over the story it tells online and the moment it chooses to bring the client back into its world.
This is also where real differentiation comes back online. A capable AI agent reflects the brand’s voice, its priorities, and its sense of what matters. Two brands selling similar products can offer radically different online experiences, the same way two boutiques on the same street feel completely different the moment you step inside. The interface stops being a generic shopping environment and becomes the brand itself.
The experience also moves to a new level. A capable agent goes beyond hyper-personalisation into hyper-contextualisation. Personalisation knows who the client is. Contextualisation knows where the client is in time, mood, and intention, at the moment of the interaction. The agent reads the signals: how the conversation started, what the client clicked, how much time they spent, what they ignored, or what they asked twice. The same client does not behave the same way at different moments, and the agent meets each moment on its own terms.
Brands worry about the risks of letting an agent represent them. The list is long and not theoretical. Hallucination, where the agent says something confident and wrong about a product or a policy. Prompt injection and adjacent security threats, where third parties try to manipulate the agent into acting against the brand or the client. Cost control, because every conversation consumes tokens, and a poorly designed experience can burn through a budget faster than expected. Data, both the protection of client information and the legal frame around how it can be used. Training, because an agent that does not carry the brand’s voice, history, and product depth will sound generic at best and wrong at worst. And the experience itself, where a single interaction below the brand’s standard can damage what years of effort have built.
These concerns are real and deserve serious attention, but none of them is unsolvable. The industry is converging on patterns to manage each one: guardrails for hallucination, evaluation frameworks for training, observability for cost, access controls for data, and adversarial testing for security. The brands that approach this with discipline will manage these risks the way they have managed every other operational risk in their history, through governance, testing, and accountability.
The deeper risk gets less attention. An AI agent acting on behalf of a client will compare, evaluate, and decide based on whatever product information is exposed. Brands that are not ready to be understood by machines as clearly as by humans will lose their place in the conversation.
Control will not come from holding back. It will come from being legible, consistent, and trustworthy across every interface where a client or an agent meets the brand.
LPM: Luxury brands have historically been cautious with e-commerce compared to other sectors. In your view, what still needs to change for luxury ecommerce to fully deliver the level of service, authority, and brand experience that clients expect?
PLB: Luxury ecommerce will not deliver until brands stop thinking in channels. Today, the client experience breaks every time someone moves from a boutique to a website to a WhatsApp conversation with their advisor. Different product data, different inventory, sometimes different prices, and almost always a different sense of who the client is.
Unified commerce is the answer, and I do not use the term lightly. The client is one person across every touchpoint, with one history and one continuous conversation. The product seen online is the same product, with the same story and the same availability, that the client will see in a boutique. A client advisor can pick up a conversation that started on a mobile screen at midnight without losing any context. Any other way to look at this is, in fact, to translate the client into a burden that belongs to the brand.
The biggest shift lies in how online and boutique relate to each other. For years, online has been treated as a parallel channel, sometimes even a competitor to the boutique, and that framing has hurt both. In a unified model, the two stop competing. A client researching a piece online can have a real conversation about provenance, materials, references, and history before stepping into a store. An advisor then picks up that thread inside the boutique, already knowing what the client has explored and what they are still wondering about. After the visit, the relationship does not go silent, as the digital side keeps the thread alive with the right context, present only when there is something worth saying.
Cart abandonment is a symptom of the broken model. The 75% who abandon a cart are not lost, clients. They are clients in a conversation that the brand could not yet hold. In a unified model, that conversation continues across the right interface. Sometimes it leads to a follow-up message from an advisor. Sometimes to an invitation to come in. Sometimes, to nothing at all, because the client is not ready and the brand chooses to wait. That kind of patience is only possible when the brand knows who the client is and trusts its own systems.
This is a hard operational problem, not a creative one. It requires alignment between IT, CRM, retail, ecommerce, supply chain, and marketing. Most luxury organisations are still structured to defend channels rather than to serve clients. Each function has its own KPIs, its own targets, and its own version of the client. Until those silos are dissolved, no amount of investment in digital experience will deliver what clients expect across all channels as a unified experience.
The luxury brands that solve this will not need to choose between exclusivity and accessibility. They will operate at a level of service on par with client expectations.
LPM: Looking ahead ten years, how do you think AI, intelligent agents, and digital identity systems will influence the relationship between luxury brands, products, and clients, and what should industry leaders start preparing for now?
PLB: We are entering what I call the human shift in technology. For the first time, the interface is adapting to us instead of the other way around. We speak, we look, we gesture, or we point as we naturally do, and the system understands. Compare that to a smartphone, which is a remarkable object but one that forces us to tap, scroll, and type with our thumbs. We adapted to it because the value was worth the effort, but that was never natural.
Over the next ten years, voice, vision, holograms, haptics, and smart glasses will combine into something far more powerful than any of them alone. Digital identity will sit underneath, allowing a brand to recognise a client across every interface without forcing them to introduce themselves every time, and the experience will be natural and seamless. That is when the real shift happens.
Some leaders still think of technology as an afterthought. That clients will keep going to boutiques, hotels, restaurants, spas, and technology will sit politely on the side. I read the next decade differently. Humans crave the human touch and the technology that makes life easier in equal measure, and the brands that have built memorable experiences in luxury have always integrated both. Lighting, climate, music, packaging, transport, and payments. All technology and all of it transparent, embedded on the experience.
That kind of invisibility does not happen by accident. It happens when a brand starts from the client and works backwards into technology, not from the brand into features. Brand centricity asks what the brand should deploy. Client centricity asks what the client needs or wants. The upcoming years will show which brands asked which question first.
That is the bar. Technology in a luxury brand should never call attention to itself. It should remove the bad friction, deepen the moments that matter, and contribute to sustaining the brand momentum between visits, purchases, and conversations.
The brands that win will be the ones with the clearest point of view on what technology should do for their clients, and the discipline to build the systems that deliver it consistently. The interface is changing. The operating model has to follow.
That is the work I find most interesting right now. It is what we are building at VersAI, and where I have placed my bet for the next decade.
Connect with Pedro López-Belmonte on LinkedIn to follow his perspectives on AI, digital identity, and the future of intelligent commerce.
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