Fashion's AI Maturity Problem: Nike Leads While Most Brands Stall at the Pilot Stage

More than a decade ago, MIT professors Vivek Farias and Devavrat Shah built an algorithm that predicted Twitter trends four hours ahead, then adapted it to forecast car sales at a Midwest dealership. The work landed in a prestigious academic journal in 2011 and was later named among MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory's top 50 innovations. The two commercialized it as Celect, a predictive analytics company that tracked who wants to buy what and matched products to people. Nike acquired it in 2019, and then-CFO Andy Campion said the deal sped up the brand's digital demand-sensing capabilities by at least three years.

The technology faced an unexpected test in 2020, when roughly 90 percent of Nike-owned stores closed for about eight weeks during the pandemic. Digital sales rose 75 percent that quarter and accounted for 30 percent of total revenues, with then-CEO John Donahoe crediting Celect for getting the right product to consumers at the right time.

Public interest in AI only took off after OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, according to Google Trends data. By the first quarter of 2026, AI-related searches hit a peak score of 100. In that environment, Nike gathered more mentions by AI than any other fashion brand in the first four months of the year, per a Semrush study analyzing 126 million U.S. AI search prompts.

Much of the rest of the industry lags. MIT maps AI maturity across four stages, from preparation through pilots and department-wide scaling to fully reimagined ways of working, and research scientist Stephanie Woerner says most companies struggle to scale pilots. A Sourcing Journal survey found over half of companies still run AI pilots, about one in five have scaled up, and only 2 percent have integrated AI into decision-making.

Fashion leaders disagree on how far AI should go. Gap and H&M use it to brainstorm designs, and Shein uses machine learning to track customer preferences in real time. Prada Group CEO Andrea Guerra called AI a fantastic tool for efficiency and customer experience but drew a line: Creativity is heart, brain, lungs, people, culture-it's not AI.

BCG's Sebastian Bak told Sourcing Journal that fashion was a little behind on AI adoption compared with other industries, partly because the business runs on desirability, making AI seem like a cold instrument. He said AI investments are doubling this year and that some companies are seeing extremely high returns while others get no value. A 2025 MIT report found 95 percent of reviewed companies were still getting zero return despite $40 billion invested in generative AI.

North Carolina State University professor Byuongho Ellie Jin, who warned in a 2021 paper that new technologies are often treated like a panacea, said she did not expect AI to develop this fast. Like the advancements before it, she said, AI is a tool-it's how you use it that matters.