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eStar and Viare product manager, Nazeef Khan, discusses the importance of people in the AI era.

AI is hard to ignore right now, and for good reason, because the technology is genuinely capable and the tools are maturing faster than most of us expected. Bringing it into the business feels like the obvious thing to do, and for most retailers it is. The real question is not whether to use AI but where to point it, and the answer, perhaps counterintuitively, is that the best use of AI is the one that makes your people matter more rather than less.

AI cannot stand next to a customer in a fitting room and tell them, genuinely, that the jacket works, and it cannot read the hesitation in someone’s voice on the phone and understand that they need reassurance more than they need a returns policy. There is a particular kind of satisfaction that only comes from another human agreeing with you, or telling you how great you look in something new, and no model, however clever, can replicate that feeling. Customers know the difference immediately.

IKEA understood this earlier than most. When they brought in AI to handle the routine enquiries flooding their call centres, the obvious move would have been to trim the team and bank the savings, but they did the opposite. Thousands of call centre staff were retrained as interior design advisors, and the calls that used to be about delivery windows became paid design consultations. The technology took the tedium while the people moved into work that was more valuable to the customer and more profitable for the business, which meant the same headcount was suddenly delivering a richer experience and a new revenue stream.

That is the leaf worth taking out of their book, and it applies just as directly to fashion retail.

Think about where the hours in your business actually go, whether that is product tagging, writing and rewriting descriptions, chasing stock data, or fielding the same order-status queries day after day. None of this work touches a customer emotionally, yet all of it eats the time of the very people who could be doing the things that do, which makes it exactly the work AI should be swallowing quietly and invisibly so the humans in the business can get back to being human.

And AI’s role does not stop at removing tasks, because its bigger contribution is what it puts in your people’s hands while they work. A customer service rep on the phone no longer has to dig through three systems to find an order when AI can surface the details, delivery status and history in real time, which means they can answer immediately and reassuringly instead of putting the customer on hold. That confidence transfers straight down the line, and a customer can hear the difference between someone guessing and someone who knows.

The same applies at every touchpoint. On the shop floor, AI can put stock levels, product knowledge and styling suggestions in front of a team member mid-conversation, so a newer hire can serve like a ten-year veteran. It bridges the knowledge gap between your best person and your average person, and that lifts the experience for every customer rather than just the lucky ones who happened to get the expert. Empowered people deliver better experiences, and AI is how you empower them at scale.

Then comes the part that makes it all pay off, which is reinvesting the recovered time. The team member buried in stock admin becomes the one running styling sessions, the rep freed from tracking queries rings a loyal customer because a new drop just landed in her size, and the content team, no longer grinding out hundreds of product descriptions, starts building the lookbooks and editorial that give a brand its personality. These are the moments that turn transactions into relationships, and relationships are what keep customers coming back when a competitor is offering twenty percent off.

All of this matters more now than ever, precisely because so much of the customer’s world is already automated. We book, bank, order and complain to bots, and in an environment where most interaction is with machines, warmth becomes the scarce commodity. The retailer who puts a knowledgeable, engaged and well-equipped human back into the journey is offering something customers can no longer get most places, and something no amount of technology spend can copy.

The retailers who treat AI as a headcount exercise will get their efficiency, along with a flatter and colder brand. The ones who treat it as a way to empower their people will build something much harder to compete against, which is a business where the technology does more so the humans can mean more. In the AI era, the human touch is not a cost to be managed. It is the whole point.