Opinion: How to Prepare Your Fashion Company For AI in 90 Days
The fashion industry is standing at a crossroads. Artificial intelligence, promising a once-in-a-generation technology revolution, is emerging against the backdrop of an already turbulent macroeconomic climate, setting the stage for industry upheaval this year.As far as technological disruptions go, this one is announcing itself clearly: AI is already changing how consumers shop for clothes and how fashion businesses operate, from creating marketing imagery to compiling insights for the merchandising team to transforming back-office jobs.This upending, like others before it, will reward leaders who engage early and penalise those who sit on their hands too long. History shows this isn’t a hypothetical risk. Just look at how the internet transformed the home entertainment business.When the internet emerged, dominant video rental chain Blockbuster had every advantage: scale, brand, distribution and capital. Yet the company failed to adapt to what proved to be a major structural shift in the market for home entertainment. Blockbuster didn’t understand and embrace how people would discover, consume and pay for video in a new technological reality.Netflix, on the other hand, didn’t just adopt new technology. It built, and continually rebuilt, its business around it, pivoting from sending DVDs in the mail to becoming a giant in streaming.Today, while there is only one Blockbuster store left standing (in Bend, Oregon), Netflix boasts more than 300 million paid memberships across over 190 countries and is moving to take over Warner Bros.Fashion is now staring at a similar but even more consequential fork in the road, and AI is moving faster than digital video ever did. How fashion leaders respond over the coming months — yes, months — will shape which companies are positioned to thrive in the years ahead. Are You Blockbuster or Netflix?If you’ve read this far, it’s likely you have a sneaking suspicion you are working at, or leading, a Blockbuster. These companies are taking a wait-and-see approach to AI. Executives pay lip service to AI at board meetings and on earnings calls, but at most they’re inserting shallow integrations of largely ill-matched, brand-name tools into outdated processes, protecting legacy workflows and assuming scale alone will save them. The Netflixes in this story are not just upstart companies coming to eat established brands. They include innovative incumbents that see a chance to actively re-architect their businesses around AI and new consumer behaviour. They’re redesigning decision-making, contemplating new ways of developing and selling fashion and generally moving faster. Chief AI Officers Won’t Save YouThere’s a comforting fantasy circulating the industry: “Hire a chief AI officer and the problem is solved.” It won’t be. In this era, the CEO must be the chief AI officer. AI isn’t a department. It needs to be the operating system of the business. But fashion is still managing billion-dollar supply chains with what I’d consider “Blockbuster energy,” relying on endless email threads, static Excel sheets, disconnected PLM systems and manual approvals that slow everything down. The near-term value of AI isn’t just creative, where the industry’s attention seems to be focused; it’s operational. It’s eliminating unforced errors, catching bad data before it becomes a seven-figure mistake, collapsing weeks of sampling into hours of simulation and predicting micro-trends early enough to better align supply and demand to avoid costly overproduction. Steal This PlanSix months ago, I felt overwhelmed too. My investors challenged me to gain a true mastery of AI, then deliver a concrete roadmap for how we would use it to grow faster and more efficiently. Within 90 days, A-Frame was fundamentally transformed. Here’s exactly what we did and how we did it.1. Hire an Expert. Then Become One.We weren’t planning to hire a CTO. Our hiring roadmap focused on product development, brand and growth. But it became obvious that without deep technical leadership, every AI initiative would stall or stay superficial. So we changed the plan.We brought on a CTO who could architect systems, not just tools. Their job wasn’t to “own AI,” but to embed it across the entire company and train people how to use it. Within weeks, AI literacy stopped being abstract and started shaping real decisions: identifying product opportunities, generating designs and specs, managing communication, forecasting, sampling and eventually launching new product lines.2. Start Top-Down and Bottom-UpInstead of starting with tools, we started with people. We interviewed every team member and we asked the same questions:Where do you lose time?Where does expertise get trapped?Where do mistakes happen repeatedly?What are necessary but mundane daily tasks that you wish you didn’t have to spend time on? The answers were remarkably consistent. High-skill professionals were spending 30 percent to 50 percent of their time on low-skill work. Product developers were overwhelmed with chasing the same data across systems. Merchants lacked real-time visibility into sales and demand. Marketing was looking everywhere for the right trend data and the design team couldn’t keep track of all our needs and requirements. Those friction points, not shiny AI demos, became the focus of our roadmap.3. When to Buy Tools, and When to Build ThemWe resisted the urge to build everything. If a best-in-class tool already existed, we licensed it. But where our advantage was proprietary — how we identify and evaluate trends, greenlight brands, allocate capital and manage multi-brand complexity — we built custom systems. AI shouldn’t commoditise what makes you special. It should protect it.4. Embed AI Into the WorkflowChat-based tools like ChatGPT and Claude are incredible for brainstorming, strategy and creativity. But the real returns came from what we call hard AI: automated workflows that quietly removed manual work and sped our time to market by over 40 percent. If AI lives outside the workflow, it dies. We embedded it directly into the tools teams already used. The result wasn’t replacement — it was expansion. Teams didn’t work less. They worked faster, smarter and with fewer costly mistakes.5. Small Automations Beat Big ModelsYou don’t need a moonshot. We focused on dozens of small, targeted automations placed precisely at friction points. Each one saved minutes or hours. Together, they reshaped the entire system. That’s how speed compounds.Time to Wake UpThe AI future isn’t coming. It’s already here. AI won’t replace fashion leadership but leaders who use AI will replace the ones who don’t. Bots will shop. Bots will negotiate. Bots will catch the expensive mistakes humans keep making. Fashion leaders can prepare, learn and build for this moment, or they can become a case study for the next generation. It’s all real, and it’s all happening right now. The only question left is: Will you adapt to and embrace technological change like Netflix? Or will you fade away like Blockbuster?Ari Bloom is the co-Founder and CEO of A-Frame Brands
