Christopher Wylie and Arti Zeighami on Harnessing AI for Sustainability | BoF VOICES

The Business of Fashion Podcast

The Business of Fashion

Fashion & Beauty, Business, Arts

4.6 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2019

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Cambridge Analytica whistleblower discusses the way H&M can use artificial intelligence to curb waste production and reveals his new role with the fast-fashion giant. Wiley is joining H&M as its director of research. He will work closely with Arti Zeighami, the retailer’s head of AI and advanced analytics, exploring how AI can help fashion better tackle its sustainability crisis.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion, and welcome to the BOF podcast.
0:09.7	A few years ago, I had the opportunity to visit some fast fashion factories.
0:14.1	I saw the same garments over and over and over again being produced in thousands and thousands of units.
0:20.5	It was only by visiting the factories in person that I really got a sense of the volume of what
0:25.9	our industry produces.
0:27.4	And then to see those same products on the shop floor only a few weeks later made me realize
0:32.9	the pace at which this is all happening.
0:35.2	Fast fashion retailers like H&M and Zara have come under fire for this business model
0:40.3	that depends on overconsumption and short product life cycles,
0:44.3	with much of the waste ending up in landfill.
0:46.3	But consumer waste is only part of this problem.
0:49.3	Last year, consumers reacted in horror when Burberry revealed
0:53.3	that it had burned more than $35 million of
0:56.1	unsold product in 2017. This is a widespread practice, not just for luxury brands looking to
1:03.0	protect their premium positioning, but also for mainstream fashion brands that are simply not
1:08.1	able to sell all of the clothes they produce, and the only way
1:11.4	to get rid of them is to destroy them. Untold millions and millions of garments destroyed each year.
1:19.1	How can we solve this part of fashion sustainability problem?
1:22.7	At Voices 2018, we talked a lot about how artificial intelligence has been used to influence elections and impact geopolitics and how it is powering the space of social robotics.
1:34.3	But what could AI do to help match the fashion products we produce with consumer demand so that there is less waste right from the very beginning of the value chain? This was a question I posed to Christopher Wiley during one of our brainstorming sessions.
1:49.0	And of course, Christopher was already two steps ahead of me.
1:52.0	He introduced me to some people at H&M who are working on this very problem,
	...

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