Thirty years ago, Gap was among a pioneering generation of American fashion retailers venturing onto the world wide web, beginning a new chapter in how customers could discover and engage with the brand. During Gap’s SF Tech Week Kickoff, Gap CTO, Sven Gerjets, unveiled new AI-powered shopping experiences designed to make discovering and shopping for fashion more intuitive, personalised and conversational across the company’s portfolio of brands, augmenting more traditional e-commerce tools like search boxes, filters and product grids.
The milestone reflects a much bigger evolution. Over three decades, Gap has moved from e-commerce to mobile, social and omnichannel retail, continually adapting as technology, culture and customer expectations have changed. Today, AI represents another opportunity to rethink the customer journey.
“Thirty years ago, we launched gap.com, revolutionising the way customers interacted with our brands, and today AI is creating a new opportunity to rethink how people shop for fashion,” Gerjets said. “We’re moving toward experiences that better understand the customer and can help connect discovery, inspiration and ultimately action in a more frictionless, intuitive way.”
From search to conversation
At Old Navy and Banana Republic, new conversational, AI-powered discovery tools allow customers to describe what they are looking for in natural language and receive relevant product ideas and recommendations. Rather than requiring customers to translate what they want into keywords, categories and filters, the experiences are designed to better understand customer intent and help people move more naturally from an idea to products that fit what they had in mind.
New ways to discover Gap
Gap brand is launching a new experience with Alta Daily that brings AI-powered styling and discovery into a more visual and personalised environment. The app helps customers turn their personal style and inspiration into curated looks featuring Gap products they can try on their Alta avatar. Gap products can also be discovered through Daydream, the AI-powered fashion discovery platform where shoppers describe what they are looking for in everyday language to discover relevant products.
“Over time, we expect AI to move commerce beyond recommendation toward experiences that can better understand customer needs and help act on their behalf. Gap is building the data, technology and partnerships needed to participate in that emerging ecosystem responsibly and at scale, while keeping customer choice, human creativity and brand relationships at the centre. The interface will continue to evolve, but our principle stays the same: start with the customer and use technology to create a better experience,” Gerjets added.
