By 2025, fashion’s commitment to AI has moved from an experimental phase to an operational necessity. Meanwhile, the AI industry has turned its attention to fashion for the first time. This gave rise to emerging practice AI optimization, or All-in-oneamong fashion marketing teams and a cottage industry of startups hoping to become fashion brands’ go-to platforms for data analysis, AI-driven personalization and advice on how to manage this change.
To make sure you don’t miss a thing about the AI era in fashion, we’ve launched a dedicated AI Trackerupdated weekly with all the news and why it matters. Experts say that for fashion executives, keeping up with rapid developments in AI is no longer a perk, but an essential part of future-proofing a brand. As Karen Harvey, founder and CEO of Karen Harvey Consulting, told me in September: “The smart fashion CEO is looking at this and looking carefully at the best use cases for AI that aren’t necessarily going to erode morale or critical roles, but allow them to innovate. Most CEOs aren’t very knowledgeable on this topic. LLMbut those who hire people to drive innovation through AI will look like the companies we saw during the pandemic, who were able to pivot online thanks to technology and not just survive, but thrive.
With that in mind, here are the biggest AI moments of 2025 and why they (really) matter for fashion.
OpenAI, Google and Perplexity rewrite shopping
Users of leading AI-based chatbots have always had free rein over the questions they ask them, but until mid-2025, turning to generative AI for clothing and accessories product discovery was a rather unsatisfying experience.
Then, in May, the companies behind the leading AI platforms launched an unprecedented new shopping offensive. The hype was asking who would become the “ChatGPT of shopping” in the AI age, and it turns out parent company OpenAI wants it to be ChatGPT itself.
The (now) for-profit company announced a series of updates to the ChatGPT shopping experience during the first week of May, including personalized recommendations, visual product details and price comparisons between retailers and reviews, when ChatGPT users search for fashion, beauty, home goods or electronics. This personalization is further enhanced if users retain their chat memory, and the company said its model will improve its recommendations over time as it begins to learn your tastes. This data acquisition was reflected in the follow-up release in November of a new “shopping search” feature powered by the ChatGPT-5 model, which creates personalized shopping guides for connected users.