Some of the best-known applications for artificial intelligence, or AI, range from autonomous vehicles to finance to medical diagnosis. But AI is rapidly expanding to every sector of the economy, including fashion. For a growing number of fashion companies, AI is already transforming the methods used to predict trends, create products and interact with suppliers and customers. Not surprisingly, AI advances raise unique new legal questions, chiefly in the realm of intellectual property and privacy.

What is AI?

Broadly defined, AI is computer technology that aims to simulate intelligent human behavior, or to perform cognitive tasks that ordinarily require human intelligence. The development of “strong AI” attempts to replicate human reasoning as closely as possible or even to create sentient machines (think Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey), while “weak AI” focuses on performing specific tasks that require capabilities similar to human cognition (think customer service chatbots that can answer a limited range of questions). Branches of AI include “machine learning” and “deep learning,” which use algorithms to parse huge volumes of data to draw inferences and make predictions.

AI in the Fashion Industry

AI's ability to gain insights from vast amounts of data has many practical applications in the fashion industry. In an era of “fast fashion” and online influencers, designers, suppliers and retailers are under constant pressure to predict what consumers want and make it available almost instantaneously. Trends change within weeks or even days, not just a few times a year. While companies have access to large volumes of data about both individual consumers and entire markets, from sales figures to social media feeds to customer product reviews, human beings can't process all this data quickly enough for it to be useful, and their conclusions are inevitably influenced by their own biases and preferences.

Enter AI, which promises to do all these things faster and more accurately than humans. Perhaps not surprisingly, the fashion industry is already taking advantage of its capabilities.

AI as Stylist

AI is increasingly being used to predict what individual consumers and broader segments of the public will buy. For example, Burberry has been a pioneer in using AI for this purpose, gathering customer data through loyalty and reward programs that appear on salespeople's iPads when the customers enter a retail store, allowing them to make personalized recommendations. In a concept store in Hong Kong, Alibaba and Guess recently piloted a system called Fashion AI, in which “smart mirrors” analyze garments a customer is holding or trying on and suggest other items to go with them. Every garment in the store incorporates Bluetooth and RFID technology; the smart mirror even alerts store staff to bring selected items to customers.

Online startup Stitch Fix, which raised $120 million in an IPO last year, uses an AI “virtual stylist” to select items for its customers based on data about their preferences, including Instagram and Pinterest feeds and reviews of products purchased on the site. At a time when consumers themselves often don't have time to sort through all their options, these companies aim to use AI to make the shopping experience easier and more personalized, increasing customer loyalty.

AI as Design Assistant

Most recently, AI's image and data processing abilities have found their way into the design process itself. In January 2018, Tommy Hilfiger partnered with IBM and the Fashion Institute of Technology on the “Reimagine Retail” project, in which FIT students created new designs for the Hilfiger brand using IBM Research AI tools and a library of designs from past Hilfiger collections. The AI generated fabric patterns colors and silhouettes, which the students incorporated into their clothing designs. The AI did what would have been the time-consuming job of reviewing thousands of images and provided inspiration for the students' creativity. The winning student design was a plaid jacket that changes color in response to voice and social media input, also analyzed by AI.