Affluent customers might welcome AI assistants, but premium service means knowing when a human needs to take over. Luxury service has traditionally meant high touch. Like a concierge who remembers your preferences or the salesperson who knows your size by heart. Maybe the hotel that anticipates what you’ll need before you step onto the shiny tiles. But the luxury consumers I know are also super-interested in AI agents and automation. Why wouldn’t they be? If an agent can book the restaurant, change the flight, locate the exact product, arrange delivery and save 20 minutes of pointless back-and-forth, that’s an all-round better experience. What they’re paying for is access to fantastic service, not max human interaction. A recent study in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services provides some neat support for that idea. Researchers examined attitudes toward AI assistants among luxury consumers in South Korea, a market with unusually high luxury spending and technology adoption. They found that emotional appeal and perceived social presence both helped drive acceptance of AI assistants. Trust also played an important role. But one other result gets me: performance expectancy itself did not significantly predict intention to use the AI.  Ease of use, social influence and the conditions supporting its use DID, though. I sure wouldn’t interpret that as luxury customers being indifferent to performance. If anything, I think the bar is higher. They expect the technology to be

Kate Moss wore Hunter boots to Glastonbury in ’05 because the field was mucky. Twenty-one years later, that spontaneous choice is still sellin’ the Wellies. Hunter turns 170 this year, and for its anniversary campaign it has reunited with Kate

Meta is making virtual reality dramatically lighter and more affordable. The big engineering challenge is making folks around the wearer comfortable. Meta just showed off the coolest VR hardware it has built to date. The new Meta VR Glasses, due in