Weaving AI into the Fabric of the Company

Scaling AI capabilities across the entire value chain of a global fashion retailer, including solutions, data and digital platform, talent, and culture

The fashion industry is undergoing multiple disruptions—a fast migration of customer journeys online, the emergence of industry-shaping platforms, and growing consumer demand for more sustainable practices, among others.

To meet these challenges while delivering products and experiences in a more sustainable, personalized, and profitable way, a fashion retailer turned to BCG to support embedding AI across its entire value chain.

We focused on a small number of critical business processes—demand planning, store assortment, customer engagement, and promotion management—putting AI at the core to transform entire ways of working.

The rapid impact generated by initial pilots allowed the retailer to build differentiated capabilities—proprietary AI-in-retail solutions, next-generation technology and data platforms, and world-class internal teams of business analysts, data scientists and engineers—which enabled further scaling of AI across the company, igniting a deep cultural change from top management to the shop floor.

AI in the retail value chain is now seen as a core component of the teams’ day-to-day lives and is driving material bottom-line impact—while contributing to sustainability objectives by producing the right quantities of the right products to meet customer demands.

OUR ROLE

BCG’s experts across our retail, AI, and data and digital platforms teams partnered with the client to cobuild custom AI-in-retail solutions and embed them in day-to-day operations while building the foundational data and AI platforms and integrating them into core systems. We also helped recruit and set up a multidisciplinary team of business and technology experts to scale these solutions across the company.

TECHNOLOGIES
Artificial Intelligence

CONTACT
Nicolas de Bellefonds and Tristan Hoag, X. AI & Software

Contact the BCG X Team