You only need to scroll Twitter for five minutes to catch a tweet about AI. More specifically, how it can already be deployed in a variety of different processes to improve efficiency, accuracy, and the customer experience.

The fashion industry has and continues to be a leading example of this – whether via online bots acting as personal shoppers or delivering ecommerce experiences that are tailored (pardon the pun) to the customer.

In the past couple of years fashion has also been turning to AI to step up the battle against one of the banes of the sector – the $1.9tn counterfeit market. It’s a perfect application of AI, which can harvest vast amounts of data relating to tiny inconsistencies in fakes. Inconsistencies which the human eye has trouble spotting some of the time. The use of this technology currently seems to be the preserve of luxury brands and their resellers, whose customers spend thousands at a time. But who’s to say this technology won’t become more accessible in the near future?

No doubt there will be plenty more great examples of AI application in fashion over the next few years, but with the EU agreeing a draft version of the EU AI Act last week - and other countries beginning to develop a (sometimes incoherent) approach to regulating AI – the industry needs to be ready for the regulation that is coming.

Fashion should now be thinking about and implementing an ethical and principles-based approach to the use of AI, particularly in the EU. This means ensuring consistent use internally through coherent policies and training, robust contracts with third party AI providers accompanied by a true understanding of the tools on offer, meaningful impact assessments, and more.

In 2018 the business community in the EU was largely unprepared for GDPR and uncertainty and confusion ensued. Businesses using ‘AI’ now, a definition that is much broader than the latest large language model, can learn from those mistakes and use the next 18 months to gain the edge over competitors.