What Role Will AI Play in the Jewelry Industry?

By Rob Bates | November 25, 2025

Artificial intelligence will likely change everything in the jewelry industry, from how stones are graded to sales management, industry tech experts agreed during a panel on AI held during the recent CIBJO Congress in Paris.

Jacques Voorhees, founder of the Polygon diamond trading network who now heads IcecapAI, said the AI revolution reminds him of the early days of the dotcom boom. But while e-commerce hurt many jewelers’ profit margins, AI could do the reverse.

It promises to “increase profit margins by lowering costs,” Voorhees said. “We couldn’t have salespeople on websites until now.”

David Block, CEO of Sarine Technologies, predicted that AI will probably take over diamond grading.

“It will replace the repetitious, tedious jobs that are done in the lab,” he said. “What does AI do very well? It does very well with jobs that are deterministic and repetitive. And that’s what a diamond grader does—he does the same action, all day. That’s a job that definitely AI can replace.

“I think it’s inevitable that AI will replace most of the repetitious work that is done in a lab,” Block continued. “Having said that, it’s a process. It won’t happen in a day, but I think it’s inevitable.”

People in the grading jobs that AI can handle will have to do different tasks that require a “higher skill set,” he said.

Block noted that while diamond cleavers have largely become a thing of the past, “those 3,000 jobs have now been replaced by 50,000 people doing the job that replaced it.”

That point was echoed by Daniel Nyfeler, managing director of Gübelin Gem Lab, who said that because of new technology, his lab’s scientists don’t have their time consumed with examining every stone that comes in.

“They always look for the same kind of pattern in trace element chemistry and so on, but it’s a very repetitive job. So it is perfect to be replaced by some kind of software,” said Nyfeler.

“Now the software spits out a result that says This stone must not be heated with a 98.3% confidence. And if it’s above a certain confidence threshold, they just do a 30-second plausibility test, and bam, then it’s done.

“So we have a massive increase in efficiency, and [employees] can gain time that they can spend in much more rewarding things, like field work, going to mines. They can maintain the system and do research. They can get mentor and train their young colleagues. So it’s much closer to what they were actually trained for than what they were doing in past years,” Nyfeler said.

Marie-Christine Grocq Parruitte, president of manufacturing company MCGP, said her business is starting to use AI, though she doesn’t believe it will work for everything.

“Jewelry is not a regular-consumption good,” Parruitte said. “It’s conveying a lot of emotion. I don’t think AI is able to convey any type of emotion.

But she added AI can be a “tremendous tool” that can “expand the abilities of our teams.”

“It can help with not just automaton of repetitive and tedious tasks, but also strengthening the reliability of analysis and decision making,” said Parruitte. “Of course, AI is not going to make the decision. But it will enable us to make better decisions.”

AI can also “be a tool to expand the reach of collective knowledge,” she said.

“The key challenge for us is to recruit and train the best artisans,” she continued. “For that, we need to share knowledge and savior faire, and with AI can we do that.”

Block also said AI opens up a “new world” of what independent retailers can accomplish, and could “level the field” against larger players.

“Can an independent retailer analyze his sales?” Block asked. “Can he analyze his visits to his website [compared] to other people’s websites?

“AI can provide a huge amount of insights and decision-making or decision-aiding processes, by providing insights on who’s searching for what and what does he need to order going forward.”

Jon Key, founder and managing director of Key and Co., a London-based consultancy, talked about how the industry can use AI to serve consumers on a more personalized basis.

“With AI, you have a totally different world, because it can start to think about 7 billion potential consumers and it can literally analyze every single one,” he said.

Stephane Fischler, chair of CIBJO’s technology committee, noted the downsides—AI sometimes provides incorrect facts, and it requires lots of power.

Lisa Koenigsberg, founder of Initiatives in Art and Culture, said AI should be used to “assist humans” and serve as a “multiplier rather than a replacement.”

“There’s a lot of anxiety of what AI could do,” she said. “[Experts] are cautioning to use it with vigilance, care, and as a tool.”

Key agreed that “no one really knows where [AI] is going. I don’t think anyone would disagree we need regulation and we need to proceed with caution. But I think it has hugely exciting possibilities that will mainly drive growth.”

According to Mahiar Borhanjoo, chief commercial officer at De Beers Group, the industry is just at the beginning of understanding what’s possible with AI.

“This is a metamorphosis or an evolution,” he said. “Nothing is going to happen in one day or one year.”

Voorhees, however, asserted that jewelers should start experimenting with AI right away.

“If you are not sure how to incorporate AI into your business, good news: You don’t have to,” he said. “Go to ChatGPT or one of the other [AI apps], tell it, ‘Here’s my business,’ and ask how it will incorporate it into the business, and it will write a 20-page paper on how you should be incorporating it into your business. Whether it will be correct or not is another question.”

The panel was moderated by Jewellery Outlook editor David Brough.