Fashion’s AI future

Data as much as design now drives the fashion industry. E-commerce – though still less significant in pure sales terms than bricks-and-mortar stores – generates an astonishing amount of information about what we buy, where we buy it, or what we looked at before we bought it (even the 75 per cent of possible sales left abandoned in digital shopping carts is a useful indicator of intent).

The industry has decided that these huge streams of data can be crunched and sifted so that consumers can be more precisely targeted, teased and tempted. Data analytics is the new