In 2025, fashion’s engagement with AI moved from an experimental phase to an operational necessity. Meanwhile, the AI industry set its sights on fashion for the first time. This gave rise to the emerging practice of AI optimization, or AIO, among fashion marketing teams, and a cottage industry of startups hoping to be fashion brands’ go-to platforms for data analytics, AI-powered personalization and advice on how to navigate this shift.
To make sure you never miss a beat when it comes to fashion’s AI era, we launched a dedicated AI Tracker, updated weekly with all the news and reasons why it matters. Experts say that for fashion executives, tracking the rapid developments in AI is no longer a nice-to-have, 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 carefully investigating the best use cases for AI that are not necessarily going to erode morale or critical roles, but enable them to innovate. Most CEOs aren’t super well educated on LLMs, but those who hire people to drive innovation through AI will come out like the companies we saw in the pandemic, who were able to pivot online through technology, and not only survive, but thrive.”
In this vein, here are the biggest AI moments of 2025 and why they (really) matter to fashion.
OpenAI, Google and Perplexity rewrite shopping
Users of the main AI-powered chatbots have always had free reign over the questions they ask them, but up until 2025’s mid-way point, turning to generative AI for apparel and accessories product discovery was a rather unsatisfactory experience.
Then in May, the companies behind the major AI platforms began an unprecedented new push into shopping. Fashion had been asking who the ‘ChatGPT of shopping’ would become in the AI era, and it turns out that parent company OpenAI wants it to be ChatGPT itself.
The (now) for-profit company announced a series of updates to ChatGPT’s shopping experience in the first week of May, including personalized recommendations, visual product details, and pricing comparisons across retailers and reviews, when ChatGPT users search for fashion, beauty, home goods or electronics. This personalization is enhanced further if users keep their chat memory on, and the company said its model will improve its recommendations over time, as it begins to learn your taste. This data acquisition was reflected in its follow-up November release of a new “shopping research” feature powered by the ChatGPT-5 model, which creates personalized buyers’ guides for logged-in users.