In 2025, fashion’s engagement with AI moved from an experimental phase to an operational necessity. Meanwhile, the AI industry set its sights on fashion for the first time. This gave rise to the emerging practice of AI optimization, or AIO, among fashion marketing teams, and a cottage industry of startups hoping to be fashion brands’ go-to platforms for data analytics, AI-powered personalization and advice on how to navigate this shift.
To make sure you never miss a beat when it comes to fashion’s AI era, we launched a dedicated AI Tracker, updated weekly with all the news and reasons why it matters. Experts say that for fashion executives, tracking the rapid developments in AI is no longer a nice-to-have, but an essential part of future-proofing a brand. As Karen Harvey, founder and CEO of Karen Harvey Consulting, told me in September: “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. Most CEOs aren’t super well educated on LLMs, but those who hire people 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.”
In this vein, here are the biggest AI moments of 2025 and why they (really) matter to fashion.
OpenAI, Google and Perplexity rewrite shopping
Users of the main AI-powered chatbots have always had free reign over the questions they ask them, but up until 2025’s mid-way point, turning to generative AI for apparel and accessories product discovery was a rather unsatisfactory experience.
Then in May, the companies behind the major AI platforms began an unprecedented new push into shopping. Fashion had been asking who the ‘ChatGPT of shopping’ would become in the AI era, and it turns out that parent company OpenAI wants it to be ChatGPT itself.
The (now) for-profit company announced a series of updates to ChatGPT’s shopping experience in the first week of May, including personalized recommendations, visual product details, and pricing comparisons across retailers and reviews, when ChatGPT users search for fashion, beauty, home goods or electronics. This personalization is enhanced further if users keep their chat memory on, and the company said its model will improve its recommendations over time, as it begins to learn your taste. This data acquisition was reflected in its follow-up November release of a new “shopping research” feature powered by the ChatGPT-5 model, which creates personalized buyers’ guides for logged-in users.
It was only a matter of days before OpenAI’s biggest rival, Google, followed suit with the announcement of its AI Mode shopping experience, a chat-style interface that enables users to converse back and forth with Google’s latest AI tools and is synced with Google’s massive search database of 50 billion continually refreshed product listings. Fast forward to the beginning of the holiday season, and Google, which has the global monopoly on internet search, had already begun quietly giving its ordinary search the AI treatment via product overviews, prompting consumers to interact with Google search as they would an AI chatbot. AI overviews for Google searches relating to apparel have increased 104% since November last year, according to research from SEO platform BrightEdge.
Lastly, OpenAI chatbot rival Perplexity debuted its own AI-powered shopping assistant at the end of November, opting to launch straight away with an integrated checkout powered by Paypal (more on that further down).
Early data suggests that the simplified buying journey created by all these shopping-focused updates is driving adoption. Direct referrals from AI engines such as ChatGPT and Perplexity to leading e-commerce brands were up 752% in October 2025, compared with the same time last year, according to an analysis of 2,000 e-commerce brands by BrightEdge. Experts say brands must be cognisant of this massive consumer behavior shift in 2026, and stay ahead of the game with the emerging practice of AIO.
Nvidia becomes the world’s first $5 trillion company, prompting AI bubble fears
Public and private investor enthusiasm for AI’s potential reached new highs on November 4, when AI chipmaker Nvidia became the world’s first company to be valued at $5 trillion. The business, which is vital for the infrastructure of the AI industry, as it makes software and hardware like graphics processing units (GPUs) and chips that power AI models, saw its shares rally after posting $57 billion in revenues for the third quarter. CEO Jensen Huang said the company had already secured $500 billion in orders of its AI chips for the next five quarters, showing demand for its products is not slowing any time soon.
At the same time, several of the biggest tech companies in the world used their Q3 earnings to revise their AI spending forecasts upwards. All of the so-called “magnificent seven” tech giants — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia — increased their capital expenditure figures from previous estimates, telling investors that they will spend tens of billions more than originally planned on AI infrastructure over the next year.
All of this spending on AI as an asset, and the market concentration of deals between these players, has led prominent investors to say that we’re living in a so-called economic “bubble” pegged to AI, a technology that is yet to deliver on its lofty promises. Fashion companies using AI tools may not be affected by an investor bubble bursting, but it would send shockwaves through wider economic markets if the tech doesn’t live up to its promise.
Fashion’s experiments with — and investments in — AI are in their infancy, compared to those of adjacent industries like advertising, where major players like WPP and Publicis have upped their spending on the tech to several millions of dollars in 2025. Experts therefore advise fashion companies to tread cautiously and continue investing in AI tools that demonstrate a clear use case for their business in the meantime — whether that be behind-the-scenes tools for operations like demand forecasting and supply chain management, or consumer-facing tools like own brand AI personal styling agents, a la Ralph Lauren.
“The biggest challenge comes when companies try to do too much at once,” Raakhi Agrawal, a partner at Boston Consulting Group, told me last month. “Those focusing on a few high-impact use cases and automating end-to-end workflows are the ones realizing real ROI.”
ChatGPT announces integrated checkout, paving the way for future ads
This was one of those moments that is much more significant than it first seemed. ChatGPT maker OpenAI was first founded in 2015 as a non-profit, with the goal to “benefit humanity with AI”. Fast forward a decade, and the company completed its restructure to a for-profit business in October 2025, giving rise to a slew of deals with other tech giants like Microsoft and allowing it to raise billions more in investment, as well as the potential to pursue an IPO.
To achieve these things, it would need to drive new revenue streams, and we’re beginning to see signs of where the company could focus these efforts. Commerce is an obvious choice, and when OpenAI announced its integrated checkout feature, Instant Checkout, at the end of September, it fueled marketing industry speculation that we’re about to see AI change advertising models significantly.
It was a long-awaited announcement, after OpenAI signed a partnership with e-commerce platform Shopify in April, and spent most of the summer piloting the feature with merchants. Integrating a checkout within ChatGPT means consumers can discover products and complete purchases without ever leaving the app, or being redirected to pay.
It first went live with Etsy in the US, for ChatGPT users with both paid and free subscriptions. At the time, OpenAI said it had “over a million” Shopify merchants coming soon, including Glossier, Skims, Spanx and Vuori. While shoppers will initially only be able to make single-item purchases within Instant Checkout, the tech company said it will expand to multi-item carts as well as more merchants and regions soon, without specifying a timeline. For every sale received and fulfilled through ChatGPT’s interface, brands will pay an undisclosed “small fee” to OpenAI, the company said.
It’s one step further toward the tech firm’s agentic checkout ambitions — where the autonomous AI agents it’s building will complete product purchases on behalf of the customer. At the same time as announcing Integrated Checkout, ChatGPT launched its “agentic commerce protocol” (ACP), an open-source tech standard that allows various AI agents from companies like Perplexity, Google and Microsoft to interact with one another, connect to different commerce systems and complete purchases, in partnership with Shopify and Commercetools.
“This marks the next step in agentic commerce, where ChatGPT doesn’t just help you find what to buy, but also helps you to buy it,” OpenAI said in the blog post.
Crucially, experts say the change paves the way for in-chat advertising that could mimic the “pay-to-play” model brands are used to within Google search. What this would look like and how it might work remains to be seen — OpenAI’s CFO has previously told the Financial Times that the company is weighing up an advertising model, but would be “thoughtful about when and where we implement them [ads]”.
Trump’s AI Action Plan increases global fragmentation of tech rules
In July, President Donald Trump signed three executive orders and published a 28-page AI Action Plan intended to build out the country’s AI infrastructure, cement America’s dominance in the industry, and prohibit all federal agencies from using AI contractors that don’t comply with the White House’s definition of “ideological neutrality”.
The new policies reversed several Biden-era AI safeguards related to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) and climate change, blocked state-level regulations on AI, and further relaxed export rules so that global companies rely further on US-built AI.
In short, the plan all but deregulated AI’s development in the US — increasing the divide between the nation’s hands-off attitude to regulating the sector and the EU’s cautious, privacy-centric approach.
In December, Trump went even further by signing another executive order, this time blocking states from enforcing their own AI rules. This is especially significant given California — the state housing the majority of Silicon Valley tech companies at the forefront of AI development — governor Gavin Newsom had been taking a relatively cautious approach to AI at the federal level, passing the first in-nation safety law in September that called for major US-based AI companies to publicly disclose their safety and security protocols, while adding whistleblower protections for AI workers. With the new order this December, Newsom’s approach becomes obsolete.
Legal experts say that for fashion companies operating on a global scale, the US orders serve as a wake-up call for brands to take matters into their own hands. In such a fragmented landscape, the onus is on fashion companies to build out compliance teams and establish their own AI guardrails — and fast. “Fashion executives and their legal teams will be able to focus less on compliance for the moment, but work harder to think faster than AI,” Susan Scafidi, founder and director of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham Law School, told me in July. Brands will have to make ethical choices about things like the use of personal data to train AI, the ranking of preferred consumers and disclosures regarding chatbots.
Navigating this fragmentation will be one of the key challenges brands face going into 2026.
Chief AI officers enter the chat
At the end of August, Lululemon announced the appointment of its first C-suite executive directly tasked with overseeing the company’s implementation of AI — a chief AI officer (or CAIO). In his newly created role, Ranju Das has been tasked with the “development and execution of the next phase of Lululemon’s technology and AI strategy”, directly reporting to CEO Calvin McDonald.
It was 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 chief data and AI transformation officer at LVMH in March 2024.
Interestingly, Nike chose a different tack, eliminating the chief technology officer role from its C-suite line-up, with former CTO Dr. Muge Dogan exiting the company. Instead, it established a chief operating officer role for its almost-20-year Nike veteran Venkatesh Alagirisamy, with technology now falling under his wing. Though the brand declined to share further detail at the time, this could suggest that the company’s AI efforts are becoming even more central to its operations.
This would make good sense, considering what AI and leadership experts have told Vogue Business in recent months. The fashion industry is still working out what a chief AI officer is, and it’s not the first time brands have looked to a buzzy new C-suite hire for answers on how to embrace an emerging technology (like the now-vanished chief metaverse officer role). But a massive AI knowledge gap is currently plaguing the fashion industry, and hiring someone who understands the tech and what it can do for a fashion company functions as a proactive step toward plugging that gap.
A chief AI officer’s core responsibilities include formulating an AI vision for a company; establishing an AI governance framework and managing risk; overseeing which AI tools (proprietary and external) a company uses; upskilling teams and making AI hires; and advocating for the use of AI across the business. All of which are absolutely essential for any company attempting to navigate the breakneck speed of tech developments.
Crucially, experts say fashion brands need to view AI as an enabler, and have someone within the business who truly understands what functions it can improve, and where to place resources. That’s someone with fashion knowledge, as well as AI knowledge, the majority say.
“Every company has a different philosophy and you can see that in the different titles that are beginning to emerge,” Pau Almar, a consultant who advises fashion brands on digital and operational transformation, told me in September. “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.”
Expect CAIO hires to make more regular appearances on our People Moves Tracker in 2026.
