Fashion Forward: How the promise of A.I. will disrupt the apparel industry

Shopping for data

While you were going about your shopping experience in Alibaba’s concept store, the company was collecting data on you: the time of day, your preferences, the items you picked up and put back, etc. All of this data was immediately saved to your consumer profile and uploaded to the cloud with thousands of other consumer profiles for Alibaba’s use.

From that data, the company has full visibility of its demand and inventory levels at all times, and can make faster, more accurate predictions about upcoming trends, avoiding situations like an overabundance of inventory. Companies competing in this race without the same technology may as well be blindfolded.

Biju Kewalram, vice president of operational transformation at Agility Logistics, explained that, for most, this is still the case; data is still largely disconnected between partners in the supply chain, which creates a barrier to efficiency optimization for companies. “We [can] generate so much data related to positioning of freight, everything from scheduling to visibility, if we can marry up that demand in those ecosystems,” he said.

At present, many companies throughout the supply chain are gathering data, but are not able to use it to its full potential due to a disconnect between partners, but Kewalram thinks that a change is around the corner.

“With the new technologies that are emerging, the lines are actually blurring,” he continued. “In the logistics world of 3PLs, warehouses, freight forwarders – all of these individual silos of data are now starting to be combined. Those boundaries have started falling away.”

H&M is taking heed of these 21st century e-tail pioneers, trading its old strategy of selling the same product portfolios across markets and instead tailoring merchandise to region by utilizing A.I. According to The Current Daily, 80 percent of the company’s stores will be powered by RFID – the same technology used to track items in Alibaba’s concept store – by next year, enabling services like “Scan and Buy,” which will allow customers to scan an in-store label and find out the item’s availability elsewhere, both at other stores and online.