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Fashion is facing a once-in-a-lifetime technology-driven transformation. How are brands and retailers responding?
At a Vogue Business evening reception held during London Fashion Week, we heard from two companies — Amazon Fashion and the AllSaints Group, which comprises the AllSaints brand, menswear label John Varvatos, and footwear brand Buscemi — about how they are innovating to improve the customer experience and what they think is coming next.
“AI is helping in very practical terms to reduce costs, drastically increase productivity and accuracy, and create a much better and different shopping experience,” said Ruth Diaz, vice president of Amazon Fashion Europe, at the event.
For both companies, recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are proving to be a game changer. Amazon has rolled out a suite of generative AI-powered new capabilities, including personalised size recommendations and the ability to draw out common themes in customer reviews. AI touches every part of the customer journey: from the personalised Amazon homepage to picking and packing in warehouses, to deliveries.
Diaz highlighted the fit recommendation tool. “When you’re buying online from a range of brands, you want to know: how will this fit me? Our size recommendations feature uses an AI model that considers what customers are looking for, what customers are returning, what customers are seeing, what questions customers are asking and the answers they are given — to be able to recommend sizes when customers come to us, for whatever brand they are looking for. And we found that the keep rate is higher when customers follow our advice.”
When considering AI’s role in customer service, Diaz and AllSaints Group CEO Peter Wood both agreed that the tech has progressed far beyond the clunky chatbots of old. “We’ve all interacted with a chatbot in the past and thought ‘oh, no, please, please put me through to a human’,” laughed Diaz. “What we are dealing with now is unbelievably different.”
AllSaints introduced an AI-powered chatbot at the end of last year. Four months later, the AI is handling a third of the enquiries that come in and resolving them, said Wood. “That means the customers that do need human contact are waiting a shorter period of time to get that service. Tech is a huge enabler for us to achieve our strategic objectives as a brand.”
Amazon has launched a beta version of its new AI-powered shopping assistant — named Rufus — in the US. “It’s like having a best friend [that knows Amazon’s selection inside and out],” said Diaz. “You can ask it, what shoes should I be wearing today? Give me a cocktail dress recommendation. What should I give my partner for Valentine’s Day? This is my budget. This is the type of thing this person likes. And it has all the information on the hundreds of millions of products, billions of customer reviews — and is able to interact with you in real-time.”
The next tech investment priorities
Brands and retailers are beginning to explore the applications of generative AI. Amazon Fashion benefits from its size, which gives it large data sets to pull from — an essential requirement for the effective use of generative AI in retail. “We have great examples of how we’re using generative AI to help brands reduce the costs of doing business with us and increase the visibility and discoverability of products,” said Diaz. “Our [generative AI-powered features] help brands create better titles, better content, in a more engaging way to connect with the customers. We can create size recommendations tailored to the brand.”
Generative AI is also helping to reduce costs in the supply chain. “We have AI forecasting what the demand will be for products every day, every week, every month,” said Diaz. “And we make decisions of where we place that inventory, in which warehouse, to be able to get it faster to the customer, and with less CO2 emissions.”
Wood pointed to the creative possibilities of combining generative AI and augmented reality. “I was in a headset a couple of months ago, using generative AI and AR to do architectural design — to basically put together a store with my team,” he recalled. “We were walking around inside a virtual AllSaints store. I could put a wall between you and me, and then I could knock a hole in the wall and see through it.”
This could extend to how fashion brands conventionally source, develop and design product, sending physical prototypes back and forth between manufacturers and design teams. “We’ve now got generative AI suggesting colours, textures, fabrics. It saves time and delivers better results,” said Wood. “We can use that to sell to wholesale customers as well — they can give us input, and we can tweak things.”
Both Diaz and Wood said that the important thing, when discussing what technology to invest in is to see it as supplementary and supportive to the human-led process and focus on what the brand and its customers need. “Your starting point is from the values of your brand,” added Wood. “Two brands using the same tech may get very different outcomes and responses from their teams and their talent.”
Diaz agreed: “It’s about what you do with technology, not the technology itself.”
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