Alibaba’s Immersive Paris Showcase Explores AI-backed Future of Retail

Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen LLM gives each visitor a customized shopping experience at Alibaba Wonder Avenue
The Champs-Elysées showcase is open to the public during the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games

Photo credit: Alibaba Group

Can a person’s favorite sport reveal their perfect perfume?

It’s a question being put to the test at the Alibaba Wonder Avenue showcase in Paris, which takes visitors on an immersive retail journey powered by artificial intelligence.

First, participants share their likes, dislikes and hobbies with a virtual shopping assistant driven by Alibaba Cloud’s large language model (LLM) Qwen.

Qwen’s image generation and multi-lingual capabilities take it from there, allowing people to create virtual avatars in their own likeness, which they can then customize with personalized makeup, clothing and more.

Virtual and real worlds collide as visitors can even smell the perfume selected by the assistant and strut a catwalk alongside their digital double.

Alibaba Group Chairman Joe Tsai walks the catwalk at Alibaba Wonder Avenue alongside his avatar. Photo credit: Alibaba Group

“In this showcase, you’ll experience a smart AI shopping assistant that is powered by Alibaba’s proprietary large language model,” Alibaba Group Chairman Joe Tsai said at the exhibition’s opening on July 27.

The English and French-speaking smart assistant narrates participants’ paths through the showcase, which, according to organizers, is receiving around 2,000 visits daily.

“Alibaba’s Wonder Avenue is the latest example of how our partnership is taking the Olympic Movement into the digital age,” International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach said at the launch.

As a Worldwide Olympic Partner, Alibaba’s involvement at Paris 2024 is far-reaching.

IOC President Thomas Bach (left) and Alibaba Group Chairman Joe Tsai at the Alibaba Wonder Avenue opening. Photo credit: Alibaba Group

OBS Cloud 3.0, launched last week by Alibaba Cloud and Olympic Broadcasting Services, makes these Games the first in history to use the cloud as the primary means of broadcast and distribution.

Alibaba is also helping measure electricity consumption at Olympic venues to aid future carbon reduction efforts, while its AI technology colorized and restored archival images of female athletes from 1900 onwards.

“The Olympic Games has been an invaluable global platform for Alibaba to showcase our cloud and AI technology,” said Tsai. “We’re proud to enable the digital transformation of the world’s largest and most complex sporting event.”

A Unique Experience

Imagine instantly creating the perfect piece of clothing, makeup or perfume tailored to your complexion, personality and lifestyle. We’re not there yet, but Alibaba Wonder Avenue comes close.

Visitors begin the process by answering a few questions posed by the Qwen-powered conversational chatbot, which uses the responses to gauge their style preferences and create a personal avatar.

With their new avatars in tow, participants enter the second part of the exhibition and receive makeup and perfume recommendations tailored to their complexion and personality.

From there, it’s the closet, where visitors select clothing for their avatars and place their virtual alter-egos in one of four parallel universes created in collaboration with Chinese artists.

To conclude the exhibition, which will run until Aug. 11 and reopen from Aug. 29 to Sept. 8, people can take to the catwalk and pose for photos alongside their avatars.

Welcome to the Future

Alibaba Wonder Avenue gives visitors a tantalizing taste of a technology-driven online and offline retail experience that is closer than ever to becoming reality.

AI-enhanced shopping is already present on C2C e-commerce platform Taobao, where a generative AI application called Wenwen—Mandarin for “asking”—can generate detailed product recommendations for users.

A visitor tries the exhibition’s makeup feature. Photo credit: Alibaba Group

During major shopping festivals like 6.18 and 11.11, the tool helps consumers parse through the bounty of promotions by identifying the most cost-effective offerings and obtaining instant price analysis.

Real and virtual worlds also meet on Tmall Luxury Pavilion.

The platform has recreated Parisian high-end shopping hub La Place Vendôme as a digital mall complete with cobblestone streets, streetlights and interactive boutiques from top luxury brands.

Eco-friendly Exhibition

The sky’s the limit when building digital structures, but not in real life. To minimize environmental impact, Alibaba Wonder Avenue has turned to Alibaba Cloud’s sustainability platform Energy Expert.

Energy Expert generated suggestions for organizers to consider when building the temporary exhibition’s structure to reduce carbon emissions where possible.

Following these recommendations, the showcase is built from sustainable wooden materials and recyclable steel. In addition, organizers opted for a semi-open design to reduce power consumption and carbon emissions, leveraging natural lighting and ventilation.

A look at the exhibition from the street. Photo credit: Alibaba Group

Alibaba Wonder Avenue isn’t the only structure in Paris using Energy Expert.

Energy Expert is also being deployed at Olympic Games venues to measure and analyze electricity consumption.

“We hope to make Paris 2024 even more efficient, sustainable and inclusive with our latest technologies,” said Alibaba Group’s Tsai.

This article was originally published on Alizila, written by Elizabeth Utley.

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Alibaba’s Immersive Paris Showcase Explores AI-backed Future of Retail

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