Ashu Dubey, co-founder and CEO, Alhena
In luxury, the most valuable asset has never been the product. It’s the person who remembers the clients; the associate who knows someone is a 38 in tailored jackets but a 40 in coats, or the one who remembers a client only wears yellow gold and hates anything too fragranced.
In stores, this kind of memory is referred to as clienteling. Online, it has been mostly missing.
For years, luxury e-commerce teams have lived with a split reality: boutiques that convert like magic and websites that behave like search engines. The service is intimate in stores, but abstract and anonymous on a screen. Conversion rates in physical boutiques can sail beyond 20% to 40%, while online luxury often struggles to reach a fraction of that.
The question is how to deliver that level of personal, premium service to millions of visitors a month without turning into a call center.
The answer is finally emerging, and it looks much like a digital client advisor.
From chatbot to client advisor
The first generation of chatbots was trained to deflect tickets, not deepen relationships. They lived at the bottom right of the screen, parroting FAQs and hoping the user would give up.
In quietly powering some of the most forward-thinking beauty, fashion and lifestyle brands, one AI platform is taking a very different approach. Instead of a bot trying to get rid of customers, it behaves like a digital client advisor: one that knows the catalog, the customer and the rules of the brand as well as the best store associate.
Under the hood, Alhena’s technology is built on an agentic architecture: different specialist AI agents working together in the background. On the surface, the shopper experiences one calm, on-brand voice. But every response is grounded in live product data, inventory, claims, editorial notes, even policy libraries — not guesswork — for a client advisor trained on a brand’s catalog, rules and taste.
How leading brands are operating this new model
The brands that are seeing the biggest impact are running AI like a new store: with discipline, merchandising and a clear service philosophy. By starting with one high-impact area, one where guidance clearly moves the needle, brands are defining what good taste means to them. In doing this, they discuss how to talk about fit, guide shades and when to suggest a set versus a single SKU.
To set up their tech for success, they’re tuning the AI to match their brand tone, whether sharp and tailored or soothing and ceremonial. And because the assistant decides the drops, capsules or exclusives to highlight and in what order, they’re merchandising the AI accordingly. By reviewing transcripts weekly, they can turn changes into guidelines, prompts and merchandising priorities to ultimately reinforce this tactic as a living part of the clienteling strategy rather than a one-time installation.
What premium clienteling looks like in 2026
Once live, premium clienteling at scale can be much like discovery that feels like a conversation, not a filter panel.
For example, a visitor might arrive at Victoria Beckham’s online flagship and say, “I loved the structured blazer Victoria wore last week, what would work for a board meeting and then dinner?” The online assistant understands the reference, pulls the exact piece, then suggests a look with tailoring, shoes and a bag that matches the customer’s previous preferences.
For performance eyewear brand Julbo, Alhena’s quizzing engine turns a few precise questions into a targeted shortlist: What sport? How bright? Prescription? Within two to four questions, the field has narrowed from hundreds of SKUs to a handful of spot-on options.
At Paula’s Choice Skincare, a shopper mentions her skin feels tight. The AI recognizes she has previously purchased products for aging concerns. It asks a clarifying question about sensitivity, then designs a personalized ritual. The tone stays soft, and the interaction feels less like a product search and more like a mini-facial consultation.
Behind these moments is a network of agents reading context like past orders, shades, ingredients the customer has avoided and even how long they have hovered on a particular product.
Across deployments, brands using clienteling models, like Alhena’s, are seeing up to 4 times higher conversion on AI-assisted sessions, around 30% lifts in average order value, material reductions in returns and more than 80% automation of routine inquiries, freeing store teams and clienteling associates to focus on the highest-value clients.
For CMOs and heads of e-commerce, this reframes AI from a cost-cutting experiment to a growth engine.
Closing the sale happens inside the conversation
These assistants aren’t just dumping a list of links as they suggest products; they drop product cards directly into the conversation. These are artfully designed tiles with images, pricing, rationale (“Perfect with your existing City Coat in Navy”) and clear calls to action, like “View details” or “Add to bag.”
For travel marketplace Manawa, those cards showcase experiences with dates, difficulty level and pricing tiers inline in chat. For beauty, they highlight texture, finish and key ingredients at a glance.
And while traditional chatbots hand off to the website at the last moment, agentic checkout, like Alhena’s, lets the client advisor walk the shopper all the way to the register.
Once the customer makes a choice, the AI can add the item (or complete look) to the cart, apply known preferences, like size or shade, and redirect to a pre-populated checkout — all without breaking the conversational flow. So styling sessions turn into baskets and recommended beauty rituals to a replenishment schedule.
Because Alhena sits across touchpoints, including on-site, social and messaging channels, it has the potential to behave more like a client book than a cookie. It remembers patterns, fills gaps for first-time visitors using cross-brand insights and can trigger gentle nudges or routine refresh suggestions at exactly the right moment.
The result is what every luxury brand has always wanted from digital: the intimacy of a favorite associate, with the availability and scale of an always-on platform.
The next wave of growth won’t come from louder performance marketing or layout tests; it will be more old-fashioned: better service, delivered through very modern means.
Premium clienteling is back; it just happens to run on AI.
Sponsored by Alhena
