The role of artificial intelligence in shaping the future of Agile fashion industry

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of every industry. With the emergence of big data, the industries, and more especially textile and apparel (T&A) industry, are on the brink of relationships with consumers, suppliers, and competitors. They need to handle different scenarios with a multitude of complex correlations and dependencies between them and uncertainties arising from human interaction. It has become imperative for them to manage huge amounts of data for the optimization of decision-making processes. In such circumstances, AI techniques have shown promise in every segment of the T&A value chain, from product discovery to robotic manufacturing. The potential wide-ranging applications of AI in T&A industry have found their ways into design support systems to T&A recommendation systems, intelligent tracking systems, quality control, T&A forecasting, predictive analytics in supply chain management or social networks and T&A e-commerce. The research recourses to the qualitative method in the form of systematic literature review and in-depth interviews from senior management people and industry experts. Findings identify the dimensions of AI to develop dynamic capability along with its potential impact and probable challenges. As such, the findings contribute to relevant literature and offer useful insights for academia and practitioners.