Alibaba’s AI Fashion Consultant Helps Achieve Record-Setting Sales

On the third floor of a shopping mall in the heart of Shanghai last week, Xiaolan He, a woman in her 50s, took an olive-green down jacket to a fitting room. To her surprise, she found a screen about the size of a large poster on the wall. It recognized the item of clothing in her hands through a tiny sensor embedded in the garment, and showed several options for matching items that she could flip through like a photo album. The screen, and the system that powers it, make up FashionAI—which essentially became He’s personal stylist. FashionAI received its first big wave of customers on Saturday during Singles’ Day, a Chinese shopping festival started by Alibaba in 2009 and held on November 11 each year. This year’s event set a record, with a staggering $25 billion worth of goods sold. And the company hopes the technology it rolled out could help it reinvent retail using artificial intelligence. Developed by a new retail-focused research team within Alibaba, FashionAI highlights how new technology, and especially AI, stands to reshape major industries.  Read more at MIT Technology Review.