Artificial intelligence in fashion − the risks, the rewards, and the responsibilities

AI is not a silver bullet for the challenges facing the fashion industry said experts at the ASBCI conference on 16 October, but if businesses can get the fundamentals right, AI offers the potential for huge rewards when targeted at specific issues.

The fashion industry gathered in Halifax earlier this month to discuss the risks, rewards, and responsibilities of the adoption of AI tools at the ASBCI’s annual conference. Attended by major brands and retailers as well as AI experts and early adopters, the conference considered the key use cases for these new technologies and how they can be applied to address the industry’s most pressing challenges.

Dr Ahmed Zaidi, CEO and co-founder of Hyran Technologies, opened with a word of warning. “AI amplifies existing systems. Is this the system we want to amplify?” He argued that fashion’s current low-cost, high-volume business model is broken. Lead times can’t keep pace with changing trends and the result is huge levels of waste and dead stock. Applying AI to this model won’t solve its problems, it will just make them worse. The industry must first fix the broken system.

This was a theme echoed by the other presenters – the need to get the basics right before jumping in with AI. From supply chain inefficiencies, overproduction, and poor-quality data, experts from across the sector made the point that AI won’t make the industry’s long- standing problems go away. As Jason Wang, chief operating officer at Alvanon, said when discussing AI and size and fit, “Implementing a sizing AI tool won’t miraculously solve returns. If you want to leverage AI to reduce returns, start by looking under the hood and addressing the root cause of your issues, which is sizing inconsistency.”

However, the event also highlighted the increasing sophistication of AI tools and their potential, if targeted at specific pain points, to revolutionise the fashion value chain. Jack Stratten, director at Insider Trends, discussed the polarised nature of consumer behaviour and how AI is helping brands and retailers transform the customer experience to keep pace, while Nick Eley, head of digital creation at ASOS, explained how generative AI is enhancing the skills of ASOS’s designers.

James Omisakin, co-founder of Compare Ethics, demonstrated how AI can automate compliance with sustainability regulations to protect brands and retailers from increasingly hefty financial and reputational penalties. Andrew Dalziel, vice president of Infor, explained how AI can help create the more agile and flexible business models so vital in today’s contradictory, fast-moving market, while Cedrik Hoffman co-founder of Ameba, looked at the power of AI to capture unstructured, disconnected supply chain data and not only make sense of it, but use it to provide business-wide visibility at all levels.

The power of data was a key theme, including the need for the industry to get its act together and capture good quality data to ensure machine-learning models deliver value. As Dressipi co-founder Sarah McVittie said, “If the underlying data isn’t good, it’s garbage in, garbage out.” She argued that brands and retailers need to focus on developing product- rich data to better understand why people buy and enable marketing on a much more personal level.

Speakers also addressed AI’s impact on the people who are at the heart of the fashion industry. Peter Gallagher-Witham co-founder of The Fashion Guild, addressed the fear of redundancies caused by generative AI in the design process, acknowledging that while this is inevitable to an extent, the rapid evolution of these tools has potential to be “amazing and liberating”. But to protect their jobs, creatives must educate themselves in their use. And Josie Pearson, agency manager for model agency The Bureau, discussed the risk to models from meta-avatars created by AI, explaining how digital model agency I Am Human protects the rights of its fit models through strict licencing and data encryption.

Jenny Holloway, CEO of Fashion-Enter, and Simon Platts, ASBCI board director and co- founder and board advisor at Recomme, directed probing audience questions to the speakers during the day’s lively panel discussions, and the conference closed with some candid words from Simon. He acknowledged AI’s potential to progress key issues such as circularity, but warned of the risks of uncontrolled, unregulated use. “We have created a monster, and in a creative industry that is very much about people, it is important that it gets off on the right foot. We must be careful how we use it.”

“This was a hugely important event about an issue that has such far-reaching implications for the fashion industry,” said ASBCI Chair Dr Julie King. “I am delighted that the ASBCI was able to host these discussions, on and off stage, between AI innovators, experts and early adopters and the brands and retailers these systems will impact most heavily. I want to thank all our speakers for their insightful and candid presentations that so clearly articulated the multifaceted and nuanced nature of AI adoption, and I’m sure this is a topic we will revisit at future events.”