This year’s Paris Olympics set out to be the most innovative and sustainable Olympic Games in history, following Tokyo 2020, which, although postponed to 2021, remained steeped in post-pandemic strife. The Paris 2024 Games have not only seen the return to full scale and public engagement, but this edition has also taken a leap in terms of technological advancements, with companies like Alibaba powering the transformation of the sporting event.

Located at the eastern end of Paris’s world-famous shopping district, the 88-metre-long Wonder Avenue installation takes visitors on a futuristic voyage that blurs the lines between physical and digital commerce, while also bringing China’s cutting-edge shopping technologies to the heartland of French luxury. Underpinned by Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary large language model (LLM) ‘Qwen’, Wonder Avenue welcomes guests to a hyper-personalised shopping experience that offers a taste of what the phygital future holds. It’s an experience promising to not only be an imaginative illustration of the future of shopping, but a manifestation of it.