Artificial intelligence has quickly become one of the biggest talking points in the fashion industry. It was a central theme at this year's TechThreads conference, where speakers including CPO of ROTATE, Calvin Baillie, CTO of Delogue, Halldor Gunnarsson, and Head of Digital & Technology leader at Lifestyle & Design Cluster, Heidi Svane Pedersen explored how AI is reshaping decision-making, product development, and business operations across fashion.
But while much of the conversation focuses on what's possible, Delogue's recent webinar with Jenny Helgason, Buying, Production and Fitting Director at ROTATE Birger Christensen, and ESG Expert and CMO at Delogue, Anja Padget, explored something equally important: what needs to be in place before AI can deliver real value.
For Jenny and her team, the conversation doesn't start with AI. It starts with product data.
Fashion brands generate enormous amounts of product information throughout the development process. Specifications, pricing, supplier information, materials, images, compliance data, and product descriptions all become valuable assets... but only if they're structured and accessible.
At ROTATE Birger Christensen, that foundation is established through Delogue, where product information is created, managed, and shared throughout the product lifecycle.
That structure has made it possible to introduce AI into everyday workflows, not as a replacement for existing processes, but as a natural extension of them.
As Jenny explains:
"Having that platform like Delogue, we can export the product data, compare that with the AI agent and say, 'Is there anything overshipped? Are we having price differences compared to what we have sent?'"
Rather than manually comparing packing lists, invoices, and product information across multiple documents, AI helps identify discrepancies, allowing the team to focus on resolving issues instead of searching for them.
Throughout the webinar, Jenny's examples remain remarkably practical.
Rather than discussing futuristic applications, she describes how AI supports work that's already happening every day.
Historical buying reports can be compared in seconds instead of hours. Pricing developments become easier to identify. Supplier negotiations are backed by years of structured information rather than manually reviewing spreadsheets.
"The AI helps me to think and say, 'Okay, now I can see where I need to manage this better. Is there a supplier I need to talk to? Or could we do better here?'"
For Jenny, that's where AI creates value, not by making decisions, but by helping people make better ones.
One of the strongest themes throughout the conversation is that AI should create capacity rather than replace expertise.
By automating repetitive comparisons and administrative work, teams have more time to focus on supplier relationships, product quality, and decision-making.
The same thinking applies across other departments.
Jenny describes how AI supports everything from generating product descriptions based on existing product information to helping logistics and e-commerce teams automate repetitive tasks, freeing time to investigate return rates and improve customer experience.
AI also plays a role in ROTATE's creative processes.
The team uses it to quickly explore colour variations, visual concepts, and product ideas that would previously have required hours of manual editing.
But technology doesn't replace experience. Can we get this from the supplier? Is this quality possible? Can we get this colour? Those questions still depend on technical knowledge, supplier collaboration, and human judgement.
AI accelerates exploration, but people remain responsible for making the final decisions.
It's easy to think of AI as the starting point. Jenny's perspective suggests otherwise.
Throughout the webinar, every AI example begins with something much less glamorous but far more important: structured product information.
Without reliable data, AI has little to analyse. Without clear processes, it has little to support.
For ROTATE Birger Christensen, managing product data in Delogue has helped create the foundation that allows AI to become genuinely useful across the business, from operational reporting and buying negotiations to creative exploration and product descriptions.
As conversations at TechThreads highlighted, AI will continue to transform the fashion industry. But Jenny's experience offers an important reminder: before brands invest in new AI tools, they should first invest in the quality, structure, and accessibility of their product data.
Because the foundation behind fashion AI isn't AI at all.
Every month, we host a webinar, often in collaboration with our IT solution partners and leading industry brands. The topics vary, but one thing remains the same: we aim to make the fashion industry’s challenges more manageable and share our take on practical, hands-on solutions.
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