The Role of AI in the Future of Fashion
October 26 , 2021
In early 2018, the global fashion community was hooked on the results of a collaboration between Tommy Hilfiger and IBM’s Watson super computer. The exciting results gave way to rumors that AI would soon replace designers. However, after three years, these expectations haven’t come to fruition. In fact, compared to other industries, AI hasn’t seem to have made a drastic impact on the industrial ecosystem of fashion.
However, that doesn’t mean that AI development in the fashion industry has been stagnant. In fact, fashion designers, retailers, and others have continued to implement AI technology into their work across the value chain, including in areas such as planning, production, logistics, and retail. In fact, COVID-19 has provided a huge push for the utilization of AI in fashion, as more consumers are turning to online platforms for fashion purchases, and need to rely on personal data for recommendations of size-specific items like pants and shoes, in a time where offline shopping may not be available for all.
One of the hot points for the use of AI in fashion is personalization. Fashion is all about expressing yourself, and to make accurate recommendations for each and every consumer, retailers and designers need to collect and store immense amounts of data, for which big data AI technology is extremely useful. Through AI data analysis, retailers can more accurately gauge an individual’s taste and generate automatic recommendations. Massive amounts of data can also guide retailers by showing them where they can invest more for company growth and improvement based on customer analytics.
One company who has become more successful thanks to the implementation of AI technology is Stich Fix, which saw soaring stock prices from surprisingly increased performance at the end of last year. The company says that their success was not due to simply utilizing data science in the fashion business, but because they redefined their business model based on data science. Taking this non-traditional approach, their business model, a “women’s clothing select shop”, attracted over 1,000 brands, rather than the mere dozens attracted by their closest competitors.
These promising results imply that investment in fashion tech startups will likely be increasing in coming years, as companies become more efficient at converting their systems to AI and continue to find new ways to take advantage of ever-evolving technology, which is also increasingly designed specifically for the fashion-tech industry. In South Korea, for example, a fashion shopping app called Brandy attracted more than 35 billion won (about $29 million USD) in investments for their emphasis on AI demand prediction algorithms for efficient shopping and shipping.
AI technology can add value in every part of the fashion industry, from the design process to sales and marketing of goods and fashion platform. The fashion industry is getting more intelligent with AI to maximize users’ shopping experience, improve the efficiency of sales systems through intelligent automation, and enhance the sales processes using predictive analytics. The future of fashion is genuinely intelligent.
