Artificial Intelligence

From the big tech giants to the buzziest start-ups, companies are architecting new AI-assisted or agentic discovery and transaction flows that rely on the ubiquity and open availability of SKU-level data, while the gatekeepers of that data are finding more incentives to lock it away.

The eventual outcome of inserting AI between people and content - commercially-oriented or otherwise - is a passive digital desert, and fashion should fear that outcome just as much as any other content creator.

This week fashion got a unique case study in “vibe coding” from a footwear brand, while a retail / delivery service partnership and a pitched legal battle between ultra fast fashion giants show different angles on a new frontier of disposability.

AI might be trying to bury SaaS, but the spectre of service days is about to return with a vengeance. Elsewhere, Pinterest reminds fashion of the importance of first party data, homegrown tech, and decades’ worth of end user context.

From a decades-old touchstone to a better-defined set of applications with a measurable ROI, the shape of fashion’s AI funnel is starting to become more concrete. But price increases potentially across the board could challenge the business case for some of it.

This week: two fashion companies forged at different stages of the early web, with very different contemporary fortunes, set out on wildly divergent paths, with a lot of AI in their saddlebags.