AI has officially entered the world of fear. After transforming everything from language to landscapes, it is now turning horror scenes into viral, spine-tingling scents, “a nightmare of fragrance,” as its creator puts it.
And the UAE, a global fragrance powerhouse, may be among the first to experience this new frontier.
Fresh off winning Tech Innovation of the Year at BeautyWorld Middle East in Dubai, the founder of the world’s first company to digitise scent is signalling a bold shift for the global fragrance industry.
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At the recently held, Dubai Business Forum – USA Edition in New York City, Alex Wiltschko, Founder and CEO of Osmo, told attendees that artificial intelligence is now capable of designing fragrances from scratch, powering perfumes already on store shelves and opening the door to a new era where scent can be created, customised, and scaled using algorithms.
Wiltschko — who previously led research at Google Brain and Google DeepMind — said his company’s Olfactory Intelligence (OI) platform is enabling brands, and soon everyday consumers, to design fragrances digitally.
Giving AI the sense of smell
As Dubai strengthens its position as a global fragrance hub, the next great Arabian oud may well be co-created by AI.
“Over the past three years at Osmo — which originally spun out of Google Brain, the birthplace of modern AI — we’ve been working to give AI the ability to understand and create fragrance,” he explained. “I led the digital fragrance group at Alphabet for six years before that.”
He describes the process almost like directing a movie.
“So, what we did is basically we put (feed) in the script and notes of the movie, and then we let our AI system, specialised for scent, figure out what that should smell like. We call it factory intelligence.”
One of the most striking examples was for the promotion of a horror film.
“What it decided was it should smell like you’re caught in a tiny cabin that’s filled with Mildew…then you can smell like the sharp metallic edge of a knife and a bit of the iron or blood. So, it created all these different notes and then put them together into this nightmare of fragrance that actually went viral with the release of this horror movie.”
Texas childhood, summer camp, and a life-long obsession
Wiltschko’s fascination with scent began far from high-tech labs — in College Station, Texas.
“I grew up in a pretty small town in Texas, but when I went out to summer camp one year … the kids from the big towns, they had the cool clothes and music. But the thing that always really blew my mind was they had these bottles of clear liquid they spray on themselves, and then people would treat them differently,” he recalled. “I was like, what is this stuff? It’s like a magic potion. So, I had to understand.”
That curiosity led him to discover a universe far richer than the few colognes popular among teenagers.
“And then I realised, actually, there’s not just few fragrances… but there’s hundreds or thousands of fragrances, and I just completely fell in love with the art form.”
At the same time, he was an avid coder — “a really big computer nerd,” as he puts it. “So, I obviously wasn’t like the most popular person in this Friday Night Lights Texas town,” he joked. But eventually, his twin passions began to merge.
He realised smell was a scientific mystery waiting to be decoded.
“Why things smell the way they do, and why they make us feel so strongly, and why they form such powerful memories… that’s just been a curiosity which has captured me my entire life, and I think I’ll work on this for the rest of my life,” added Wiltschko who went to Harvard University where he earned a PhD in olfactory neuroscience.
Birth of modern AI — and breakthrough in smell
His years at Google coincided with the emergence of the transformer architecture, the breakthrough behind ChatGPT and today’s large-language models.
“So, I joined Google Brain… about a year or two before the transformer paper came out, so I got to see the birth of what now we call modern AI,” Wiltschko said.
At the same time, he and his colleagues were discovering something previously assumed impossible; that AI could predict smell.
“What we ended up figuring out is that we could use AI models originally developed in the realm of chemistry, like pharma, biotech, and we could apply these to what people thought was a super subjective thing, which is smell… we ended up publishing a series of papers that showed we actually can teach AI how to think about smell under certain constraints.”
Like all AI, it learns from patterns — and grows stronger with data.
“So, we’re always expanding the data that underpins these capabilities,” he added.
Scents created by AI already in stores
For those wondering how far along the technology is, the answer is simple: it’s already on the shelves.
“You can buy products on shelves right now that were designed with olfactory intelligence,” Wiltschko added.
One of the most imaginative projects came from the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, which asked Osmo to create a scent for its iconic sculpture made of towering electric guitars.
“The briefing they gave us was a picture of a 30-feet-tall statue of electric guitars. Looks like a tornado of electric guitars. They just said, make something that smells like this,” he said.
“And we did it. It smells like an electric-guitar riff – vibrant and electric. They sold out of their gift shop, and they’re actually bringing it to department stores now.”
Democratising perfume design
Wiltschko’s ambition is not to compete with fragrance houses, but to open the world of perfumery to everyone — from giant consumer brands to everyday creators.
“What we’re trying to do is democratise and design… we build software systems that help (companies) do that, and then we use the same software systems…but we open it up to the world for anybody to create their own fragrance.”
The vision extends to consumers designing scents for loved ones, or entrepreneurs crafting scents for new startups.
“Anybody in this room (to the DBF audience) could create a… gift for their husband or their wife that’s perfectly tailored to what they want their personality,” he said. “We’re creating a new era of digital tools… for scent, which has remained extremely private (so far).”
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