Last week, Lululemon announced the appointment of its first C-suite executive directly tasked with overseeing the company’s implementation of AI. In a newly created role as chief AI and technology officer, starting today, Ranju Das will oversee the “development and execution of the next phase of Lululemon’s technology and AI strategy”, and will directly report to CEO Calvin McDonald, the brand announced on Tuesday.
It’s the latest in a string of AI-focused senior leadership appointments at fashion and luxury brands. In May, Ralph Lauren promoted Naveen Seshadri to an expanded role as chief digital officer with a focus on AI; in April, Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) appointed Brian Franz as its first chief technology, data and analytics officer with a focus on AI, amid its transformation plans; and Julie de Moyer was appointed as chief data and AI transformation officer at LVMH in March 2024. Meanwhile, Jason Loveland has occupied the head of AI role at Nike since 2020.
The variation in these job titles reflects how nascent the role is within the industry — recruiters say fashion brands are still working out what responsibilities should entail, just as they’re working out what AI could mean for their businesses.
It’s not the first time that the fashion industry has looked to a buzzy new C-suite hire for answers on how to embrace an emerging technology. A few years ago, brands were weighing up whether to hire a chief metaverse officer — a role that vanished from the industry almost as swiftly as it appeared. The current rapid developments in AI are undoubtedly impacting fashion, but an AI knowledge gap is plaguing the industry — making it harder for CEOs to decide where to place resources, and to be sure these new hires can have a meaningful impact.
“AI is everywhere and nowhere in fashion right now, because there are very few people in the industry who understand what it can really do,” says Pau Almar, a consultant who advises fashion brands on digital and operational transformation. “We’re at a crucial moment where brands have to understand what the reality of AI is for their businesses, and try to find the skills to make the required change — so they’re looking for someone who understands the business, the possibilities of AI and can make the AI transformation.”
What does a CAIO do?
Broadly speaking, chief AI officers (CAIOs) oversee the deployment of AI within a business. Their core responsibilities include formulating an AI vision for a company; establishing an AI governance framework and managing risk; overseeing which AI tools — both proprietary and external — a company uses; upskilling teams and making AI hires; and advocating for the use of AI within the company. This last task is especially relevant for fashion brands, consultants say, due to the industry’s fears of creative IP being compromised by feeding work into open source LLMs, and AI superseding human creativity and replacing jobs.
“I’d say this is probably the most dramatic innovation we’ve seen when you’re looking at businesses like fashion that are based in creative IP,” says Karen Harvey, founder and CEO of Karen Harvey Consulting. “Fashion is worried about AI threatening its world because you have a human at every level — so what companies really require is a creative person who can step into the centre to keep the humanity in the brand, but who also has that technical expertise to use AI to help the business scale while protecting IP. They need someone they can trust to decide where to give the AI a job.”
Establishing AI governance is also becoming increasingly urgent at global fashion brands, as the regulatory landscape becomes even more fragmented. President Trump’s AI Action Plan all but deregulated the development of AI in the US, widening the gulf between the region’s hands-off approach and Europe’s more cautious attitude to AI policy. Legal experts say establishing AI guardrails is now a business-critical function for brands operating across different markets.
“Companies need to ride the horse in the direction it’s going and create some ground rules within the company and set values, as well as training people up,” Harvey says. “Leaders need to remember that their younger millennial, Gen Z and soon-to-be Gen Alpha employees are using AI all the time personally — disruption always seems to come from the ground up.”
The two multi-brand conglomerates to make the hire, LVMH and ELC have rolled “data and analytics” into the job title, to reflect their use of AI to utilise the vast amounts of consumer data they’ve accumulated over the decades.
But while de Moyer at LVMH is entirely focused on data and AI transformation, ELC chose to combine the chief technology officer role with data and analytics when the group hired Franz in April — combining both functions historically housed across different teams.
Franz tells Vogue Business that the decision to bring this work under one leader allows ELC to be more strategic about how it infuses AI and data and analytics into everything it does across the business — as well as streamlining its tech operations. “We have 80-plus years of insightful data on our consumers, markets and industries — a vast database of knowledge that’s our advantage as it allows us to know what consumers want, when they want it and where they want it,” Franz says. “Bringing this together with AI helps us harness this data as a strategic asset to drive faster, smarter decisions across the enterprise.”
Do you need a CAIO and a CTO?
The CAIO is the latest entry to the seemingly constant rolodex of senior leadership titles that come and go within the corporate fashion world. For Lululemon, AI is a new adjunct to the CTO title, whereas LVMH has carved out a wholly separate role.
“Every company has a different philosophy and you can see that in the different titles that are beginning to emerge,” says Almar. “But AI is both a technology and a disruptor, so I think the CAIO role should be more about business and transformation than purely technology — if you hire someone who understands all the functions that AI could disrupt, from content to inventory management, they’re going to have a much bigger impact than a pure tech hire.”
Tech teams at fashion brands have ebbed and flowed over the last 15 years, according to how relevant they are when technological developments burst onto the scene — from the dawn of social media to the augmented reality/NFT craze.
Harvey points to when CTOs welcomed a proliferation of chief digital officers in the wake of Instagram’s launch in 2011, as brands sought out leaders who could understand how to adopt social media platforms as a channel for brand communication and 24-7 consumer engagement, and fend off competition from new direct-to-consumer (DTC) tech platforms like Everlane and Stitch Fix by upskilling teams on how to do e-commerce. While these teams waned over time as they began to fall under marketing, the CTO has remained constant at brands through the years. Harvey believes the CAIO roll will follow a similar trajectory — and should be kept as a distinct job title.
“The CTO who’s been building global tech infrastructure for a brand is absolutely critical, and I personally don’t see that going away or the CAIO disrupting that role,” Harvey says. “I think you’re going to go up the bell curve here to start really hiring these people, they’ll teach and integrate very close to the CEO, then that role will taper off once integrated, like the CDO.”
Should all brands hire a CAIO?
Lululemon’s appointment of Das is geared towards AI transformation within the business, having previously led large-scale technology and AI transformations within the healthcare and consumer industries. CEO McDonald said the company is making the appointment to “further leverage AI and technology to advance our product innovation process, improve our agility and speed to market, and to bring more engagement and personalisation to our guest experience”, in a statement accompanying the news.
Appointing an AI head makes sense for brands like Lululemon, which still have a lot of untapped growth opportunities, according to Almar.
“If you think of AI from a business point of view, it’s an enabler,” he says. “Lululemon still has so many markets it can enter, they have possibilities of entering more sports, and for creating better content to try and bridge the gap between them and a brand like Nike — so using AI to get there faster makes a lot of strategic sense.”
As the main generative AI search tools like Google’s AI Mode and Open AI’s ChatGPT move further into conversational commerce with their AI shopping search tools, Franz believes this role is now a crucial way for fashion and beauty brands to hold onto customers.
“AI is now a part of every aspect of our lives, regardless of whether the industry has previously been tech-forward, so leadership needs to have experts focused on this work in order to stay relevant with consumers and be effective,” Franz says. “We’ve seen over and over that our consumers are invested and interested in the AI space — for example, we know our consumers are now using AI-search LLMs such as ChatGPT and Claude to shop and get recommendations on products. So we’re putting resources towards researching this space and ensuring our brands are prepared for this.”
For smaller and mid-size brands that can adopt AI tools faster than large organisations with legacy IT systems, hiring a designated CAIO may not be as business-critical. But Harvey says every brand that wants to build should be prioritising a proper understanding of AI.
“I believe the smart fashion CEO is looking at this and carefully investigating the best use cases for AI that are not necessarily going to erode morale or critical roles, but enable them to innovate,” Harvey says. “Most CEOs aren’t super well educated on LLMs, but those who hire people who are to drive innovation through AI will come out like the companies we saw in the pandemic, who were able to pivot online through technology, and not only survive, but thrive.”
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