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.
AI has moved beyond pilot projects in fashion, beauty and retail, and is now being embedded in everyday workflows. It’s also reshaping how employees are thinking about their careers. Across functions and seniority levels, workers are adjusting their expectations around progression, skills development and job security faster than most organizations have updated training, job descriptions, promotion criteria, or governance.
In this environment, the workforce risks becoming fragmented. In absence of clear direction, teams are more likely to develop inconsistent practices, forming their own assumptions about when and how AI should be used, what “good” looks like, and how their value is measured.
According to a Vogue Business survey of over 300 current and aspiring fashion, beauty and retail professionals, the overwhelming majority (88%) believe there will be an expectation to understand and use AI in their role in the future. Most managers (82%) are already discussing AI with their direct reports, and many employees say they have already begun upskilling themselves in lieu of formal AI training programs offered by their company.
Experts stress that leaders should set parameters around AI use before habits form. “Leaders have to be really clear — when they’re hiring people, when they’re communicating with people, when they’re doing town halls — that our priority is for you to understand AI in your job and in this specific way,” says Grace McCarrick, workplace culture expert and soft skills coach, who works with Amazon, Uber, and Spotify. A clear AI strategy should define where the organization draws lines around capability, ethics, brand values, and cultural priorities. That clarity must also extend to governance — from intellectual property ownership and supplier contracts to data leakage and disclosure.
From developing clear AI company values to communicating job safety, experts share how fashion and beauty execs can lead well in the age of AI.
Once a clear AI strategy is in place, experts say brands should introduce AI into workflows gradually, focusing on function-specific pilots that can prove the technology’s usefulness to the teams that will use it. As those workflows shift, experts encourage leaders to reward employees who connect AI tools to better business decisions or outcomes, rather than simply applauding experimentation for its own sake. Executives will also need to decide who takes accountability when AI-assisted work fails, and how to audit decisions.
Clarity and boundaries must sit alongside psychological safety, to reassure teams that AI is meant to support their work rather than replace it. Executives face a balancing act between enabling experimentation and protecting human value, experts say. Ultimately, speed cannot come at the expense of craft, brand voice, or judgment.
Here, we break down our data on how different generations are thinking about AI and careers, how promotion paths and leadership expectations are evolving, and what this means for the future architecture of the workforce.
What the workforce believes about AI
Vogue Business’s survey data reveals a split workforce when it comes to the perception of AI. When asked how they feel about AI’s future impact on their careers, respondent sentiment is almost evenly distributed across the scale, from very negative to very positive. This disparity will complicate executive decision-making. The challenge will be to set a cohesive company culture: organizations that communicate on either end of the extreme — “AI will save us”, or “AI is the enemy” — will struggle to bring together cross-functional teams with nuanced views, especially in larger companies.
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One of the clearest signals from our data is that employees expect AI to become a baseline requirement for future roles, and many are already preparing for that shift. While 88% of respondents believe AI skills will be required in their future jobs, only 32% say their company currently offers any form of AI training, while just 27% report access to a budget for AI tools. The gap between expectation and structural support is already shaping behavior: 46% believe it is their own responsibility to upskill, compared with 31% who see it as their employer’s duty. For executives, this signals a workforce that is moving ahead regardless of formal strategy or guardrails. The risk, however, is a lack of consistency in brand standards and ways of working.
For executives shaping company-wide strategies, there are differences across generations, seniority levels, and business functions, which are essential to take into account. Under-25s are more likely to frame AI through a lens of fear around job loss and concerns around ethics and reduced creativity. Mid-career employees are more tool-oriented, prioritizing technical AI proficiency more than any other group. The 45-plus segment is both the heaviest daily user and the most optimistic about AI’s role in complex problem-solving, reflecting a more pragmatic and cyclical view of technology, as they’ve been through several innovation cycles throughout their careers.
For leaders, these differences translate into competing needs: younger teams asking for boundaries and values, mid-career managers seeking capability and recognition, and senior professionals focused on strategic leverage.
Function also shapes expectation. Respondents working in marketing, PR and communications expect to use AI to automate benchmarking, campaign testing, and administrative tasks. Creative direction and content professionals anticipate a shift from asset production to concept testing and systems design, freeing up time for strategic work. Merchandising, product development and buying professionals view AI as a route to better visibility, forecasting, and fewer production errors. Finance, sales and operations professionals emphasize support on analytics and decision-making. Those working in creative roles, from designers to stylists, express the greatest anxiety about originality and the erosion of junior learning. These contrasts show that a single narrative about AI will not resonate internally; what feels like opportunity in one department can feel like a setback in another.
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Among business owners and freelancers, nearly half (49%) predominantly see AI as an advantage, while 55% believe it will allow them to scale without hiring — a mindset that is likely to influence expectations as talent moves between independent and corporate work. Employees, meanwhile, are already anticipating that junior and entry-level roles will be most affected, as administrative tasks are automated, and that promotion criteria will shift in ways that make progression beyond middle management less linear.
Experts say the workforce is preparing for a less traditional career ladder and more skills-based work — changes that will test traditional models of management, succession planning, and workforce design.
The workforce architecture shift
The next phase of AI adoption will reshape how work is divided between entry, middle and senior levels, and how organizations balance human craft with AI-enabled decision-making.
For decades, many corporate teams in fashion, beauty and retail have been organized as a relatively clear ladder. Entry-level roles were often heavy on coordination — sorting schedules, compiling research, drafting pitches. These tasks were not glamorous, but they provided a training structure. Middle managers were the connective tissue, translating strategy from above into execution below. Their value lay in owning processes and aligning teams. Senior leaders, in turn, relied on those layers to surface the right information and make judgement calls on brand, risk, and investment.
AI puts pressure on that model, and if left unaddressed, it poses a risk for retention. Often, entry-level tasks are now the easiest to automate, sparking concerns that an already risk-adverse generation could have fewer opportunities to break into the workforce and learn through repetition and exposure. Survey respondents voiced concerns that AI will “hinder the development of younger adults, making them more dependent and less able to think for themselves”. In the middle, AI is expected to absorb planning and routine decision support, meaning promotion criteria may shift from “runs the machine” to “improves the machine”. For senior leaders, the challenge becomes redesigning career paths and performance criteria in a workforce where attitudes to AI vary widely.
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Experts predict three structural shifts. First, the move from task execution to decision quality: as AI produces more first drafts and provides further analysis and options, roles will tilt toward evaluating outputs, stress-testing assumptions and making trade-offs. “[As a leader], you have to show what good critical thinking, judgment and discernment look like in your organization, and teach that — otherwise you’re setting people up for failure,” says McCarrick. In creative industries, this human layer includes taste, storytelling and brand judgment, which will become more valuable as increasingly easy content and ideas generation risk sameness.
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Second is a gradual shift from role-based progression to skills-based progression, as organizations prioritize portfolios of capability over a single, linear remit. Anu Madgavkar, partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, describes a shift from a T-shaped model (deep expertise in one specialized area) to an M-shaped model (multiple areas of depth connected by broad, transferable skills). That opens up opportunities for cross-functional problem-solving as a capability and retention lever. “The research shows us that people who work in organizations that bring diverse teams together, and have them work live on solving a problem, end up creating the most upwardly mobile career ladders,” Madgavkar says. AI tools can either concentrate power in a few high-leverage operators or democratize capability across teams, depending on how access and incentives are designed.
In this sense, workforce design is a crucial leadership challenge rather than just an HR afterthought. If administrative work no longer serves as a training ground, companies will need new entry routes — structured rotations, supervised AI use, clearer quality standards, and earlier exposure to appropriate doses of decision-making. Learning models and promotion criteria will also need to evolve to teach and reward skills, like judgment and adaptability, over pure output.
Finally, organizations will need to plan hybrid human and AI capacity together: how many roles are needed and what they are needed for. “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 Madgavkar. “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.”
Methodology and demographics
Vogue Business launched a five-minute survey to understand how AI is impacting careers in fashion, beauty and retail, open from October to December 2025. It was shared with Vogue Business newsletter subscribers, LinkedIn followers, and directly with 500 industry contacts.
In order to take the survey, respondents were aged 16-plus, and working in the fashion, beauty or retail industries (including employees working in any function, business owners, and freelancers), or a student aspiring to work in those sectors. Among the respondents, 31% were aged 16 to 24; 33% were 25 to 34; 24% were 35 to 44; and 12% were aged 45 and over. Women made up 85% of respondents, while men accounted for 13%, non-binary representatives accounted for 0.8%, and the remaining 1.2% preferred not to disclose their gender.
Those currently working in fashion made up 60% of respondents, while those working in beauty and retail made up 6% and 7%, respectively, and students accounted for 27%. Of the professionals, 37% were business owners or freelancers, while 63% were employees. Of those employees, 41% worked at a luxury company, 26% worked at a mid-level or accessible luxury company, 21% worked at a mass-market fashion, beauty or retail company, and the remainder worked across fashion councils, agencies, media companies, higher education and more.
Those working in marketing, PR and communications represented 48% of employees, followed by 10% in creative direction or content creation; 7% in merchandising, product development and buying; 6% in fashion or beauty product design; 4% in sales or commercial; 4% in business operations and project management; 2% in supply chain and logistics; 2% in tech, digital strategy and innovation; and the remainder worked across HR, customer service and client relations, finance, legal and compliance, data and analytics, photography, hair and makeup, styling, modelling, talent agencies, editorial, and education.
The survey was shared with a primarily Western audience. Among the respondents, 37% lived in the UK; 14% in the US; 13% in France; 6% in Germany; 6% in Italy; and the remaining 24% consisted of those living in Australia, New Zealand, India, the UAE, the Philippines, Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Japan, Türkiye, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, Croatia, Ireland, Cyprus, Latvia, Kosovo, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Canada, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, Venezuela, South Africa, Uruguay, Brazil, and Mexico.
