Welcome to the Vogue Business Careers Guide: AI Edition. Based on a survey of over 300 industry professionals and students, this series unpacks how AI is changing careers in fashion and beauty at every level, and what it takes to future-proof your path in the AI age. Read part one here.
If you’re an executive at a fashion or beauty company, your LinkedIn feed is likely overflowing with thought-leadership posts about AI implementation and its benefits. But for every AI evangelist in the C-suite algorithm, there are just as many fashion and beauty employees who feel negatively toward AI. In a recent Vogue Business survey of over 300 current and aspiring fashion professionals, 43% of respondents say they feel positive or very positive about AI’s potential future impact on their careers, 32% say they feel negative or very negative, and 25% feel neutral. Leaders are under increasing pressure to decide if and how their companies will use the still largely unproven tech, and bring such a split workforce in on their decision-making.
Experts say business leaders are more likely to be positive about AI’s potential than less senior employees — a sentiment that echoes across our survey data. Among fashion business owners, for example, 50% of respondents see AI as a competitive advantage to their company, versus 21% who see it as a threat. At the same time, 55% of fashion business owners view AI as enabling them to scale their business, while over 30% do not.
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Where fear around AI ethics, job loss, and reduced creativity governs younger survey respondents, pragmatism reigns among older respondents’ answers. Those with more career experience were much more likely to say they’re embracing the technology as a way to improve efficiency, free up time for creativity, and future-proof their businesses and careers.
That generational divide exposes a growing leadership challenge for fashion and beauty companies: AI is increasingly viewed as a strategic necessity by those at the top, while many employees — particularly those earlier in their careers — view it as a potential threat to creative autonomy, job security, and professional identity. As fashion companies move from the experimentation to implementation phase with AI tools, executives are being forced to confront not just whether to adopt the technology, but how to do so in a way that maintains trust, motivation, and internal culture among a fractured workforce.
“From my first job through the changes in wholesale to my current senior role in e-commerce partnerships, the only truism about fashion and retail is that you have to move with the tide and the times,” says one Gen X survey respondent who works as a VP of luxury sales. So how can fashion’s decision makers support their full workforce through the adoption of AI?
Develop a clear AI point of view
Where much of AI’s impact on jobs remains unknown, the onus is on leaders to provide clarity to employees when it’s within their control — namely, if and how their company will use AI, and what their values and guiding principles for AI will be.
“A lot of the fear among fashion employees at the moment stems from just having no idea about what’s going on — poor communication, essentially,” says Karen Harvey, CEO of recruitment firm Karen Harvey Consulting. She emphasizes that a leader’s ability to craft a narrative around why the company is using AI is the most important skill in this new era — particularly at brands that want change to feel participatory, rather than purely top-down.
As external AI regulation remains sparse and creative experiments with AI present risks around IP and originality, experts say creating boundaries for your company’s AI use is as important as convincing employees where they should employ the tech.
“Senior leadership needs to be very clear and very pragmatic on where the company draws the line,” says Filippo Bianchi, BCG’s global head of luxury. “Then, once you’ve drawn those boundaries, you have a sandbox where its use can be checked and measured as you go along.”
Job loss is a top concern around AI adoption for fashion’s workforce, but no senior respondents to the Vogue Business survey cite replacing human workers as a current or intended use of the technology. Instead, the ability to do more with less is the common thread. While the majority (55%) of business owners and freelancers view AI as a way to scale without further hiring, the concept of freeing employees from more menial tasks to focus on strategy and the creatives is one of the most-cited benefits of AI among more senior employees.
“The question for C-suite leadership to decide on is what we do with human capacity: are we going to trim down costs by shedding people, or capture this value by training and using people to do things that we couldn’t do earlier, like spending more time with customers,” says Anu Madgavkar, partner at McKinsey Global Institute and co-author of a recent report on how AI agents and robots will transform workforce skills across industries. Among experienced fashion professionals, more menial tasks like admin, research, campaign testing, budgets, and analysis are the tasks being replaced by AI, according to our survey respondents. Madgavkar emphasizes that it’s now up to leaders to decide where their employees should focus their newfound time, instead.
“If you have a billion dollars of free capacity, how are you going to use it to further the mission for your business? This is the real C-suite leadership challenge at this moment, and it will endure and intensify in the coming years,” Madgavkar adds.
Create a culture of learning
As new AI tools are released almost weekly, experts say good leadership is less about having all the answers and more about setting the tone for how teams and senior management adapt and experiment as one.
That starts with being clear about what AI can and cannot do. Madgavkar says McKinsey’s research has led her team to split leadership into two levels. The first — managerial leadership — includes performance tracking, goal setting, prioritization, budgeting and resourcing, some of which, she says, can be significantly automated by AI. But the second level — judgment, coaching, and helping teams improve how they work — remains firmly human, McKinsey concluded. “That’s squarely in the less automatable part of the leadership skill spectrum,” she says.
The distinction matters as enterprise AI agents move from theory to practice. In the last few weeks, major tech companies including ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Anthropic have released enterprise-focused platforms designed to help companies build and manage AI agents that they say are designed to be “digital co-workers”. These aren’t tools that simply replace people, Madgavkar argues, but aids that leaders should frame as still needing human guidance, interpretation and creative direction.
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Openly addressing employee concerns about how innovations like AI agents may alter workflows is key to reducing job displacement anxiety, experts say. “The number one thing is psychological safety,” says creative and marketing consultant Grace Abbott. “As the leader, it’s your job to bring the team along and decide what kind of company culture you want.” This means being intentional when reassuring employees that AI is there to support their work, not erase it. Abbott points to the importance of showing how automation can free people from routine tasks, allowing them to focus on more strategic or creative thinking. “You’re going to have to develop people out of the routine things they’re doing in real time,” she says.
Alongside a rapidly rising demand for AI fluency, a recent McKinsey report concluded that a core set of eight human skills remain essential for employees across industries as AI adoption increases — communication, management, operations, problem-solving, leadership, detail orientation, customer relations, and writing. One surprise, Madgavkar notes, was the growing importance of detail orientation. “Somebody with an eye for what matters and the ability to focus,” she says, describing it as a crucial counterweight to an overabundance of AI-generated ideas, especially for more creative functions within brands.
Where the competitive advantage in luxury stems from taste, cultural sensitivity and storytelling, echoing these values in the internal company approach to AI can encourage employees to experiment with new tools, reassured that their human discernment still matters.
“We know that people drive strategy, we don’t expect technology to do that, it’s an inform,” says Harvey. “So sharing values, guidance, and ways of learning with employees is now the way to lead.”
