“What does the future of fashion look like?”
With 73% of consumers expecting brands to embed their personal preferences directly into their shopping experience, and 72% admitting they are less loyal to a brand when they can’t find what they want on their website, how to efficiently and effectively utilise Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be a key consideration for many businesses in the upcoming months. With this in mind, our Director of Paid Media, Katie, travelled to Milan to attend Google Unfold, the first pan-EMEA Google event dedicated to the fashion industry, which aimed to ignite creativity, drive innovation, and envision the future of the fashion industry.
We started the day in Google’s Milan offices, hearing talks from a variety of speakers from Google, covering topics from how AI can be utilised to amplify creatives and video marketing, to how brands can utilise it to enhance their overall commerce experience. This was then followed by a tour of Milan’s premier fashion district, complete with stops at some iconic brands to see how they are tailoring their in-store experience. We ended the event at the historic Palazzo Serbelloni, where we explored some key AI product innovations, and heard talks from more fashion leaders, as well as Google’s European leadership team, about how they see AI integrating into their businesses in the future.
Throughout the event, many of the talks and products featured centred around four key AI principles aimed at making AI helpful for everyone:
- Improve knowledge, learning, creativity & productivity
- Build the most helpful platforms and devices
- Enable others to innovate & grow
- Build and deploy responsibly
A key element was the acknowledgement that the way people search is rapidly changing, with the average search term length now being 20 words, and over 12 billion visual searches being made per month using Google Lens. Whilst we’re already seeing this shift in the search engine results page (SERP), with the inclusion of AI overviews becoming more prominent, and advertising platforms, with Google Ads integrating smart AI into its campaign building process, the next step for brands is how to integrate these developments into their user experience onsite.
Katie shared her reflections on the event:
It was great to attend the Unfold event, hearing from both Google & industry leaders about how they envisage AI supporting their brands moving forwards. As an agency, we’ve been testing a number of AI initiatives over the last year or so, so it was both interesting and exciting to learn about upcoming developments that we can implement to continue helping us, and our clients, to be at the forefront of marketing innovation!
Article author
Chiara Riva
Business Development Assistant
