The Very Group will launch a new Gen AI Innovation Lab powered by generative AI, machine learning, and storage capabilities to deliver interactive and personalised digital shopping experiences to millions of customers.

The company explained the Gen AI Innovation Lab will trial new generative AI-powered retail solutions to revolutionise how customers shop on its ecommerce platform, combining advanced cloud and generative AI capabilities with Very’s retailing experience and insights.

Very believes this will help create new products and immersive ecommerce offerings that will power more relevant, timely and personalised experiences for its customers, and enable better decisions at scale for its colleagues.

This collaboration will include Very engineers and data teams coming together to work closely with experienced specialist teams from the newly launched $100m AWS Generative AI Innovation Centre to leverage AWS generative AI capabilities through Amazon Bedrock, noted Very.

Very highlighted that AI experts will help the company securely use generative AI at scale, navigate technical challenges, and roll out new experiences for customers more quickly and with less heavy lifting.

Matt Grest, CIO at The Very Group, said: "We want to be recognised as one of the UK’s leading AI-powered retailers. To keep our customers satisfied and transform our business operations, we've chosen to build on our existing strategic relationship with AWS and incubate new generative AI-powered products with a trusted collaborator and innovator who understands how we work with data at scale."

The Very Group added it has already successfully implemented AI to enhance its business operations. The company said it uses AI to forecast product demand and plan inventory, which led to better product availability and enhanced customer satisfaction.

Very is of the view that this collaboration with AWS is a significant step forward in its use of AI to enhance the retail customer experience.

Generative AI: the new rage between fashion apparel companies

Generative AI is a type of foundational AI technology that uses machine learning algorithms to create content, including text, images, audio, video, speech, design, and software code.

According to GlobalData it is the fastest growing of the five advanced AI technologies and is receiving the most attention in recent times.

GlobalData's apparel company fillings data shows the fashion industry is tapping into this technology as the keyword 'Generative AI' is a leading theme in 2023 with 145 mentions. This is closely followed by 'AI' which is mentioned 116 times and 'Amazon Web Services (AWB)' has 24 mentions.

The Very Group isn't the only apparel company taking advantage of Generative AI's benefits. Spanish retailer Mango, for example, launched its own conversational generative AI platform called Lisa last month (October).

Mango said the platform uses different models, both private and open-source, and is trained specifically for the company to help employees improve the development of its collections and its after-sales service as part of a wider digital transformation strategy.

Recently, OMMAX's VP of data science and data engineering, Dr Hardy Kremer, shared that introducing Generative AI into inventory management systems is the next step for fashion retailers wishing to solve inventory problems.

Our signals coverage is powered by GlobalData’s Thematic Engine, which tags millions of data items across six alternative datasets — patents, jobs, deals, company filings, social media mentions and news — to themes, sectors and companies. These signals enhance our predictive capabilities, helping us to identify the most disruptive threats across each of the sectors we cover and the companies best placed to succeed.