AI and Customer Experience in the Fashion Industry

Introduction

The Fourth industrial revolution introduced by the digital transformation is allowing the fashion industry, like many other sectors, to increase its capacity to produce and use data that was not previously technically or financially feasible. The most important impact on production and distribution is yet to come. In a recent interview (March 6, 2019) Federico Marchetti, CIO and founder of YOOX talks about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not only helping to revolutionize the production - the brand “8” is produced by YOOX through AI-but also in selling and marketing, since big data and AI will allow each customer to have his/her own homepage.

Artificial Intelligence has been around since 1956 and has made massive rise: beating the best human at chess, beating the best human at complex strategy game. Recently brands have started to adopt this technology for the core service. There is no doubt that the relationship between machine and human has changed. AI covers computing technology that can do things typically requiring human intelligence, from understanding language and recognizing visuals to making plans and solving problems. Artificial Intelligence has been gaining lots of attention in the recent months, and is a growing technology used in different fields. Through the collection of organized data, AI and its algorithm has the ability to take out useful, meaningful information. Providing a full customer experience is the goal of every brand, and AI is more and more incorporated in it. It is believed that “By 2020, 85% of the customer interactions will be managed without human” – Gartner and we can already notice that AI has been more than present in our past shopping experiences, either online or offline. The main objectives in its use for customer experience are to improve it, by time and efficiency, it allows us to answer easy questions that doesn’t need to be asked anymore, just by the use of specific information.

According to the Artificial Intelligence High Level Group of the European Commission (2019): “Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to systems that display intelligent behaviour by analysing their environment and taking actions with some degree of autonomy to achieve specific goals. AI-based systems can be purely software-based, acting in the virtual world (e.g. voice assistants, image analysis software, search engines, speech and face recognition systems) or AI can be embedded in hardware devices (e.g. Advanced robots, autonomous cars, drones or Internet of Things applications) “.

Due to the online antagonism, many e-stores give to customer the opportunity to personalize the pages so that they can use it more easily. This is very expensive process as it needs several employees to work on this kind of system implementation. This is the reason that many researchers are working in finding and evaluating customer aids in their shopping. Different studies allow an imitation of the virtual shopping of users. Many experiments used a behavioural approach, and the results has shown that a personalized page is not always the best customer aid function for all the users in comparison with simpler ones(Saponaro, M., Le Gal, D., Gao, M., Guisiano, M., & Maniere, 2018).

The time has come to restyle the fashion industry business which has been the embodiment of styling for quite a long time. It is the circumstance of the pandemic which causes such changes inescapable. The progressing pandemic (COVID) has constrained the style business to vamp up the advances which can make individuals more secure just as give the client's an enhancing experience. Fashion Industry is viewed as perhaps the most serious business sectors where something which is moving today may end up in the corner the following day. In the background of the pandemic, the AI can be utilized as of the most brilliant instrument to help the interests of the clients. At the present time, it has been utilized to expand the efficiency of the assembling of the garments and the smooth working of ventures. We have just seen the “recommendations dependent on what you have seen” on different OTT stages like Netflix, Amazon, and a plenty of others. The current climate esteems individual experience as the most noteworthy. The steadily expanding request of shoppers for profoundly customized design style, the requirement for improved stock administration, the expanding impact of advanced media on style decision, and the need to recognize significant purchasing patterns have been not many key drivers of AI in style.