Luxury Unfiltered: The AI reckoning will separate true luxury brands from imitators

February 25, 2026

Daniel Langer is the founder and CEO of consulting firm Équité

A recent research report went viral and rattled the markets.

Written as a fictional dispatch from June 2028, Citrini Research paints a scenario where artificial intelligence triggers mass white-collar unemployment, collapses consumer spending and sends the S&P 500 down 38 percent. Software stocks cratered.

IBM had its worst day in 25 years.Michael Burry shared it and added, “And you think I'm bearish.”

The report describes what it calls the “human intelligence displacement spiral.” AI gets better.

Companies need fewer people. Laid-off workers spend less.

Surviving firms invest harder in AI to cut costs further. The cycle accelerates.

The middle class, built on the premium society once paid for human thinking, gets repriced to zero.

Here is what almost everyone missed: this scenario will be catastrophic for the broad economy, and equally catastrophic for every luxury brand that was never truly luxury to begin with.

The Citrini thesis rests on one core mechanism. When AI replaces white-collar work, the wealth does not disappear, it concentrates.

Dramatically. The top decile gets richer.

The aspirational middle erodes. The economic pyramid does not shrink; as a matter of fact, it sharpens.

For most industries, that is terrifying. For the brands that have mastered extreme value creation, it represents an opportunity.

But here is the uncomfortable truth: most brands that call themselves luxury have not mastered it. They are priced high.

They tell a story of quality and craftsmanship, but their competitive differentiation is low, positioning them in the sea of sameness. They may have mastered the façade of exclusivity.

What they have not mastered is the one thing that will determine survival in an AI-saturated world. The human dimension of their brand.

I see this constantly when I audit luxury brands and their client experiences across markets. The gap between what leadership believes the brand delivers and what clients actually feel is staggering: the brand story is not clearly defined, leaving clients confused instead of inspired.

The client interaction is transactional. The retail experience feels scripted.

The emotional activation that a true luxury brand must deliver is absent. These brands operate under an illusion of safety, convinced that history and product excellence will protect them.

It will not. If the Citrini scenario plays out, the first casualties will be volume-driven brands that depend on the aspirational middle.

That buyer is the first to lose spending power. But the second wave will be far more surprising.

It will be many of the heritage houses, the storied maisons, the brands with impeccable craftsmanship credentials that assumed those credentials were enough. They are not enough.

They were never enough. They were simply never tested, because a rising tide of global wealth papered over the weakness.

The test is coming, and it will be administered by the audience these brands can least afford to lose: the next generation of ultra-high net worth clients. My proprietary research reveals something that should alarm every luxury CEO.

Young ultra-wealthy clients increasingly feel that luxury brands could not care less about them. They sense the indifference.

They experience the gap between brand promise and brand reality every time they encounter an advisor who does not understand them, does not recognize what they value, and does not create the feeling that justifies a six- or seven-figure purchase.

This generation has grown up with hyper-personalized digital experiences. Their AI tools anticipate their needs better than most salespeople ever will.

They arrive at a luxury experience with an unconscious expectation of being deeply understood. When the brand fails, the damage is immediate, permanent, and shared instantly across their global networks.

Here is the paradox the market has not yet processed. AI makes everything abundant.

Information, analysis, content, code, design, strategic thinking at a competent level. When abundance is everywhere, scarcity becomes the ultimate currency.

And the scarcest thing in an AI-saturated world is a genuine human connection that makes you feel truly seen. That is the core of what luxury has always promised.

The brands that deliver it will become more valuable than ever. The brands that merely claim it will be exposed.

The strategic implication is urgent. Luxury brands that respond to the AI revolution by automating their client experience are investing capital to eliminate the very thing that justifies their premium.

The correct response is the opposite: use AI behind the scenes to understand clients more deeply, to anticipate needs, to choreograph the conditions for extraordinary human moments. Then let the human deliver what no machine can. Warmth. Judgment.

The feeling of being truly seen by someone who genuinely cares. This requires brand story and experience optimization first. Only then can an AI-supported ecosystem unleash a radically human-centric approach.

Most brands rush to deploy AI tools without first defining a point of view worth amplifying. This is brand suicide in real time.

The Citrini report has the market asking: what happens when AI displaces millions of workers? That is a question for economists.

The question for luxury leaders is far more urgent: in a world where machine intelligence is abundant, how do you build a brand that is worth more because it is irreducibly human?

The brands that answer that question will define the next era. The ones that do not will discover that no amount of heritage can protect them from irrelevance.

2028 is around the corner. Start now.

Luxury Unfiltered is a weekly column by Daniel Langer. He is the CEO of Équité, a global luxury strategy and creative brand activation firm, where he is the advisor to some of the most iconic luxury brands. He is recognized as a global top-five luxury key opinion leader. He serves as the executive professor of luxury strategy and pricing at Pepperdine University in Malibu and as a professor of luxury at New York University, New York. Dr. Langer has authored best-selling books on luxury management in English and Chinese and is a respected global keynote speaker.

Dr. Langer conducts masterclass management training on various luxury topics around the world. As a luxury expert featured on Bloomberg TV, Financial Times, The New York Times, Forbes, The Economist and others, Mr. Langer holds an MBA and a Ph.D. in luxury management and has received education from Harvard Business School. Follow him on LinkedIn and Instagram, and listen to his Future of Luxury Podcast.

Share your thoughts. Click here

Luxury Unfiltered: The AI reckoning will separate true luxury brands from imitators

Follow @LuxuryDaily for the latest in luxury news

Luxury Unfiltered: The AI reckoning will separate true luxury brands from imitators

BMW presents 2026 Art Makers enrollees

The Shops at Crystals houses largest Van Cleef & Arpels boutique in Las Vegas

’Threads of Impact’ theme guides upcoming FIT Annual Gala

Mandarin Oriental names first global wellness ambassador

Baccarat embraces new visual chapter

Luxury on trial: What will stand up in 2026

Omega closes out Milano Cortina 2026

British designer Clare Waight Keller joins BFC board