Meet Hong Kong’s Web3 entrepreneur bringing AI to the masses: jeweller to the stars Payal Shah is focused on educating women in the digital space and insists AI should ‘include all genders’

May 1 , 2024

Who is Payal Shah? Meet Hong Kong’s pre-eminent female Web3 entrepreneur and the founder of jewellery brand L’Dezen, who says she wants AI ‘to include all genders. Photo: May Tse

Get to Know

Shah’s brand L’Dezen was one of the first jewellery companies in the world to incorporate NFTs, enabling customers to assume both physical and digital ownership of pieces

A boot camp and training organiser at Female Entrepreneurs Worldwide, Shah says it was possible for entrepreneurs and artists to ignore Web3 during its heyday, but ‘you can’t ignore AI’

Payal Shah is deeply entrenched in Hong Kong’s art and tech scenes. Her jewellery company L’Dezen, founded more than 12 years ago, was one of the first to incorporate non-fungible tokens (NFTs), allowing customers to assume both physical and digital ownership of her pieces.

Shah, who has over 115,000 followers on Instagram, has always been both artistic and tech-savvy. She is one of the most vocal voices on X posting about Web3, and was named by Tatler Asia as one of the 30 most influential women in the NFT space. Now, she’s one of the most influential female voices on artificial intelligence (AI) in Hong Kong.

Payal Shah addresses the audience at Aether Living’s Wellbeing for Female Founders event at Soho House, in Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan district, in March 2024. Photo: Handout

She attributes much of the success of L’Dezen and her own personal brand to her dedication to following the latest tech trends. “In this competitive world, you have to find ways to grow and stay ahead of the curve,” said Shah. “If you’re constantly involved in what’s available and innovating, then all of a sudden you’re keeping your brand relevant, and that gives you a competitive edge that you’d normally need to pay millions of dollars for.”

Recently, Shah’s focus has shifted away from Web3 and NFTs to AI. Though she still likes the core ideals of NFTs, namely the idea of giving ownership back to the artist without the influence of a third-party entity, she feels that things haven’t unfolded the way she had originally hoped, at least thus far.

Hong Kong Baptist University students pictured in July 2022 performing the song “Pearl of the Orient”, at Hong Kong City Hall, in Central, against a video backdrop created by artificial intelligence. Photo: Handout

“I love the conversations and I love it from the artist’s perspective, being an artist and jeweller myself, but I don’t know if there’s going to be mainstream adoption any time soon,” she said. “The onboarding process is still too much of a hurdle for people to have a cryptocurrency wallet as easily as they’d have, say, an Apple Wallet. And because of all of the scammers in the industry, I have some artist friends who say they would never touch it.”

Shah now regularly hosts seminars and workshops with a focus on educating artists and entrepreneurs about how to use AI. “Research is a huge part of the design process – what the latest trends are or where they’re headed, and AI makes that process way more efficient,” she explained. “You’re creating with the idea of: yeah, I’m an artist, but I want to make sure this art converts into sales, so I need to incorporate data. So I’ll find out, how much do my potential customers spend per year on jewellery? What’s the material of the year? And so on.”