Brunello Cucinelli Launches Website Innovated Through AI
MILAN — You can’t deny Brunello Cucinelli’s enthusiasm in approaching and narrating whatever project he undertakes, and even more so with his latest, the unveiling of his namesake company’s new website based on artificial intelligence.
So much so that, in a tongue-in-cheek moment, Cucinelli told the audience gathered at the Piccolo theater in Milan on Tuesday that assistants standing near the stage were ready to distribute smelling salts should anyone “feel faint seeing the beauty of the site.”
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Cucinelli was clearly in his element on stage, flanked by his daughter Carolina, his close friend and architect Massimo de Vico Fallani, and Francesco Bottigliero, chief of humanistic technology of the company. During the presentation he called the team of five engineers and mathematicians who created the platform of the new site to join him, as well as Francesco Milleri, chief executive officer of EssilorLuxottica, the brand’s eyewear licensee, who was a guest at the event and also embraced “the vision and hope that AI will improve the life of people.”
“In late summer 2021, we formed a team of researchers to explore possible ways to adopt AI in our activities, respecting the human values we believe in, combining human creativity with the potential offered by technology and a year later named the project Solomei AI,” said Cucinelli, with a reference to the name of the town where his company is based, Solomeo.
Bottigliero on a screen showed how the site works, with “content no longer confined to the pages, but flowing freely, organized as users navigate,” he explained.
Cucinelli admitted he is not well-versed in technology, and that a key purpose was for people within his company and his customers to feel less threatened and concerned by AI. “The guiding principle of our work on humanistic AI has been and will continue to be the pursuit of a serene and hopeful attitude toward a technology that, I am certain, will bring benefits to all humanity,” he said.
As Cucinelli himself pointed out, the site is in line with all that he stands for and there is no doubt it perfectly reflects his values and personal taste.
For one, the platform operates thanks to AI-based “agents” named after Cucinelli’s beloved philosophers and mentors, including Socrates, “who studies, learns, knows he knows nothing, and is tasked with seeking the truth in a dialogue with visitors,” Bottigliero said.
Another agent is Demosthenes, standing for identity, “who can express himself with words and tones of voice consistent with the goal of each project in the chosen languages.”
The Dioscuri are two agents that “monitor the correctness of the conversations, protecting the dialogues between the site and the visitor.” For example, Bottigliero typed in a question about Cucinelli’s political preferences, and the Dioscuri prevented a response.
Callimacus is the philologist, the agent that verifies, modifies, corrects and improves content through the interaction with the visitor. Thamyr is named after the ancient Greek painter and Theano, the architect, is “the technological engine of the project and was conceived to overcome the manual loading of content,” Bottigliero continued. All these agents form the Solomei AI platform, with a soundtrack by musician Piero Salvatori and handmade drawings in black and white — a reference to the manual work so dear to Cucinelli.
Cucinelli explained that the site at first originated from the idea of offering the equivalent of Zenodoto, the first director of the Great Library of Alexandria, Egypt, one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world, when he first decided to set up a Universal Library in Solomeo in 2021. The aim for the platform was to respond to queries about the texts, “in tens of different languages.” The library is not completed yet, as his family’s foundation is restoring the 18th-century villa that will house it, but Cucinelli said that he has already amassed 70,000 titles.
The logo of Solomei AI shows two profiles that appear to want to kiss, a metaphor for “an act of love between human intelligence and AI,” Cucinelli said.
The site was unveiled on Tuesday, and while the company’s corporate page will continue to exist as is, Cucinelli is also working on an e-commerce site fueled by the AI platform.
Solomei AI was conceived also “for those that want to know more about us” and, in fact, offers much information about Cucinelli’s life, “linking the future with the past,” he added.
Cucinelli emphasized that the purpose of the site is also to engage with a technology capable of bringing out the best qualities of both artificial and human intelligence. This led to the idea of using AI to innovate the way websites are designed and built. The new website does away with the concept of pages and menus and hosts content that flows and combines freely in front of the visitor.
He said Solomei AI results “from the union of what human creativity can imagine and the great potential that artificial intelligence can offer.”
As reported, AI was a focus of Cucinelli’s three-day Universal Symposium on Soul and Economics that drew the likes of LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, who received an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Perugia; Laurene Powell Jobs, and Google’s James Manyika, among others. The first symposium was held in May 2019.
Cucinelli has not only built a business selling his luxury collections to Silicon Valley leaders, but also a network of personal relationships carefully nurtured over the course of several years, with the likes of Jeff Bezos and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, centered around the common goal of “humanizing technology, sharing questions about eternity and leaving a mark on earth.” It all dates back to 2016 when Benioff and Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom invited Cucinelli to a dinner in San Francisco, asking him to talk about his humanistic vision. In the two following years, Benioff asked Cucinelli to be a guest at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual tech conference in San Francisco.
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