On Monday, February 6, Chinese high-end e-commerce retailer Secoo announced plans to integrate ChatGPT into its online luxury retail business.
Through artificial intelligence, the high-end brand claims that interactive conversations similar to real-life interactions will further enrich the relevance of its brand through luxury-related text and video content and eye-catching product descriptions. In the future, the company plans to conduct in-depth research and expansion of artificial intelligence technologies.
The move comes just months after the online luxury retailer filed for bankruptcy twice in 2022, with a total of 153 million shares frozen in the company. To make matters worse, it lost a legal battle against the Italian luxury brand Prada.
For this very reason, public opinion from Chinese netizens was quite mixed. On the one hand, several netizens praised the unique pairing of luxury services and artificial intelligence, commending Secoo on its understanding of using the latest trends to capture its audience. On the other hand, however, some netizens worried that Secoo was just hopping on the bandwagon just as most enterprises did with the metaverse.
Much like in the rest of the world, ChatGPT has blown up on Chinese social media, with the hashtag “ChatGPT” amassing nearly 20 million views on the microblogging platform Weibo. The new technology has gained so much traction that Chinese tech giant Baidu is reportedly gearing up to join the AI race in full force with its very own natural language processor, dubbed “ERNIE”.
All in all, the company that once served as a cautionary tale for all companies aiming to get a foothold in the Chinese market is now aiming to win over the market and salvage itself from its past blunders. Whether or not this new merge of luxury retail and technology will prove effective, only time will tell.
