The Robots Are Coming For Your Wardrobe

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing just about every industry, with billions being poured into algorithms for everything from self-driving cars to detecting cancer to chatbots. Not so much fashion. Mad Street Den, a three-year-old artificial intelligence startup founded by a husband and wife team in Chennai, India, is boldly going where few startups have gone before. The couple’s complementary career paths have helped. CEO Ashwini Asokan was previously with Intel Labs working on product design; her husband and CTO, Anand Chandrasekaran, is a neuroscientist who switched over to AI when he realized the technology wasn’t quite there yet to build silicon brains. After living and working in the U.S for years, they returned to their country of birth in 2014 to build a startup, tooling around with a few different ideas before landing on fashion. Since then, they’ve developed over a dozen AI-assisted tools for online retailers, many of them using computer vision algorithms that can suggest pieces to finish an outfit or meet a customer’s tastes. The company says that in an internal study, online shoppers spent 72 minutes on websites where its software was deployed, compared to 25 minutes on sites without it. Read more at Fast Company.