Stressed or Well Dressed - does AI have the answer?
As someone who is fascinated by AI, I had to know how it might influence how we dress, how we feel and how we behave - asking will it make us more stressed or more well dressed in the future?
To find out more I interviewed Kate Ancketill on this week's podcast to get the lowdown on the link between clothes, confidence and a positive mindset through an AI lens. Kate is a Business Futurist meaning she is constantly looking at the trends that will influence how we shop and how we live over the next few years, studying all the elements of consumer behaviour and right now her main focus is the impact of AI.
What is evident from our conversation is that the rapid pace of change we are seeing in how we live our lives will only speed up over the next few years
'We have no idea how fast this is going to go and how quickly economies are going to change and how unexpected that is, because obviously the technology is exponential, it keeps speeding up...we literally have to change our thinking every day'
Whilst this feels both incredibly exciting and terrifying (and mildly stressful) I wanted to understand what it meant for our identity, how we choose to style ourselves, our self image and our confidence.
Kate's view is that agentic AI (she explains what it actually is during the podcast) will help us access the tools and support that will meet our hyper-personalised needs and service us in a way like never before. Whether it is finding the exact seat on the exact flight to a very specific destination or locating the specific shade of burgundy knit that we are desperately searching for AI may be the virtual life admin assistant we have always dreamed of.
Where it gets really exciting is the opportunity for agentic AI to offer human level advice on style with some retailers already getting in on the action to help people identify what 'well dressed' means to them at an emotional level and what outer statement they want to project through their clothing choices.
'Zalando demonstrated the fact that you could type in your requests, which might be I'm going to a wedding in Barcelona in April, and I want to feel like a respectable mother of the bride, or I want to feel gorgeous and have a standout outfit or whatever it is you wanted to feel, because they found that people didn't just want the facts of this is going to be the temperature, this is the kind of cultural scenario of formalness, they found that people wanted to describe the emotional state that they wanted the clothes to make them feel. The GPT was able to come up with the suggestions that fitted the emotional need states.'
In addition to this we discuss the fact that agentic AI offers the opportunity for individuals to access style advice which has been generated in the voice of anyone in the world that you choose past or present - so you could get credible style advice based on your shopping behaviour from an AI version of Coco Chanel, Kim Kardashian or Gianni Versace.
Whilst all this is thrilling, it is also slightly terrifying and we discuss the fact that we can't forget the benefit of true human interaction (however good your agentic AI stylist might be). I was really pleased to hear that even though AI can unlock so many great opportunities for us to be less stressed and better dressed - Kate thinks it has a way to go before it is able to replicate true human authenticity and creativity so our crazy ideas are hopefully safe...for now.
Listen to the conversation here to learn more about agentic AI, understand why teenagers in South Korea are spending more on dressing their online avatar than on the clothes in their physical wardrobes and to identify the AI tools you should be using right now.
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/stressed-but-well-dressed-hosted-by-dahlia-stroud/id1725889381
Have a great weekend
(I must caveat that in a world of AI this newsletter was written solely fuelled by an offline coffee and a slice of toast)
Dahlia X
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Fascinating topic Dahlia Stroud - ultimately our opinion is largely based on our conditioning so if we train AI to have those same pre-conceived ideas of course it can help. It will also remove a decision making process so allow humans to be more efficient.