LAS VEGAS — Gap Inc. is entering into a new stage of its online shopping experience.
The apparel company on Tuesday announced two new AI technologies designed to streamline shopping: personalized fit guidance with Bold Metrics and a partnership with Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol.
The overarching objective, according to leadership, is to help customers feel confident about product fit and to streamline discovery and purchasing with the help of artificial intelligence.
“We have to keep testing and learning because the space is moving so fast,” Sven Gerjets, chief technology officer at Gap Inc., told an audience at Shoptalk. “We’re trying to really focus on walking and chewing gum at the same time and accelerating the strategy forward and moving the company in new directions.”
A partnership with Google
Gap Inc. is an early launch partner with Google on its UCP protocol, a structure that will allow the retailer to bring its experiences into agentic chat environments. Shoppers will soon be able to discover the retailer’s products in Gemini and AI Mode in Google Search, initially completing shopping via Google Pay. UCP will also allow the retailer to offer loyalty and promotional offers to shoppers.
Relevance on large language models is becoming increasingly critical as shoppers are gaining familiarity with a richer type of natural language experience, Gerjets said.
“We’re not in the wait and see mode around AI at all. We really want to lean in.”
Sven Gerjets
Chief Technology Officer, Gap Inc.
“For us, relevance is super critical,” Gerjets said. “But, we also don’t want to push our customers out to an experience. We want to maintain the relationship.” That means not just allowing someone to click a buy button as an anonymous customer, but bringing Gap Inc.’s brand essence into another space.
For Gap, it’s important that the company can be found where customers want to be. That means engaging with the website, mobile app and social channels, but also on new discovery platforms. “We want to be very early,” Gerjets said. “We’re not in the wait and see mode around AI at all. We really want to lean in.”
That doesn’t mean just being on the right platform at the right time, it also means setting the direction for protocols.
A partnership with Bold Metrics
San Francisco-based Bold Metrics is an AI fit and sizing platform that uses digital twin technology to help determine a brand’s fit and sizing, with the objective of improving conversion rates and reducing returns.
The overall objective for Gap Inc. is to help customers feel more confident about the products they are selecting.
Soon, when customers set up a size profile with the retailer and then search with an LLM and ask, for example, what size of pants would fit them, the technology will be able to provide an answer.
The retailer is focusing on sizing as one of its first customer-facing AI initiatives simply because it is a huge customer pain point, Gerjets said. AI functionalities are becoming more viable every day, but the questions Gap Inc. are currently thinking through include what is ultimately valuable to the customer and will they adopt it?
“There’s a lot of things out there that are being launched in companies and in stores that feel very kitschy to me,” Gerjets said. Instead of being focused on tech for tech’s sake, Gap is interested in what the technology can enable.
And that includes helping shoppers understand the fit of apparel. The resulting partnership with Bold Metrics is “something that we think will really move the needle for our customer experience,” Gerjets said.
Many brands are thinking through AI technology and how to best incorporate it both in their operations and customer-facing solutions. “Everybody’s trying to figure it out,” Gerjets said. “From my perspective there’s a first mover advantage in this. We’re learning, testing, failing, pivoting, adjusting every day.”
Taking those risks gives Gap Inc. a competitive advantage, “because starting from scratch once the space has evolved and stabilized I think is way too low. I feel like we have to be at the tip of the spear for the change,” he said.
