It seems like no matter if they’re skeptical or enthusiastic about it, everyone is talking about AI. Its development over the past few years has many asking questions about how to use it, why it’s important, and how it will impact businesses overall. That’s why we brought in AI expert Brian Delp to tackle this tricky topic. Brian Delp is a frequent speaker, author, and advisor on topics in the fashion industry, and a skilled user of various AI technologies, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and his favorite tool for students, Notebook LM. In addition to overseeing a global business in home textiles as President at Himatsingka America, Delp also serves as Vice President of the Home Fashions Products Association (HFPA) and teaches Fashion Marketing at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
In this TEXTalk, Delp focused on teaching us to avoid the opposite of artificial intelligence — natural stupidity, sharing, “AI should be considered as a tool within your organization, no different than a calculator, helping you do work faster and more efficiently as a tool. But tools are useless if you don’t understand how to use them, especially if you don’t know how to use them ethically and safely.”
Before we take a deep dive into its relevance to the home textiles industry, here are a few key terms that Delp recommends knowing right off the bat:
- Artificial Intelligence: Computers performing tasks that typically require human reasoning, judgment, or language understanding, like writing product descriptions or analyzing trends.
- Machine Learning: Systems that learn patterns from data rather than following pre-programmed rules.
- Deep Learning: A subset of machine learning where neural networks learn complex patterns from large datasets.
- Large Language Models (LLM): A pattern recognizer for language that predicts what words or phrases should come next.
- Generative AI: Tools that create new content, text, images, code, or designs based on patterns learned from existing examples. The technology behind ChatGPT and DALL-E.
Now that you’ve got the basics, let’s talk a bit more about how this may be relevant to you.
What does AI mean for our customers, and what does it mean for our industry?
To set the scene, Delp shared, “There is an extensive industry building and growing within the AI space.” In January 2023, ChatGPT set the record for the fastest-growing consumer application in history. And it’s still growing. Just this year, the number of weekly active users doubled between February and October from 400 million to 800 million. Furthermore, AI is expected to add $15.7 trillion to the U.S. economy by 2030, and it’s estimated that 70% of employers will hire talent with AI-specific skills. So, what does this all mean for the home textiles industry?
Customer behavior is rapidly changing thanks to the adoption of Gen AI search tools, and this technological shift has large ramifications for a customer’s journey to find your products. Some key elements of this change are: the shift from keyword-focused search to multi-modal semantics-focused search, the ability for consumers to use context-rich and conversational style search, and the ability for Gen AI to provide curated answers and a personalized approach. With results varying from model to model, the funnel is widening, meaning that in order to make use of these hyper-personalized responses provided by AI, companies will need to focus on long-form content and review their current content for context that can react to sentiment analysis used by these models.
Where do I start?
Before diving into using these tools right away, Delp recommends setting internal guardrails to frame your business’s policy. This includes talking with all internal stakeholders, consulting your legal team, and paying attention to the global legislation that is developing around AI use. He shared that if you’re not sure where to start with your AI policy and do not have a legal team, you can consult existing resources like this policy template by RAI Institute. Once you’ve drafted your policy, make sure to train your teams so they fully understand the guardrails you’ve set in place.
Next, you should be ready to evaluate AI tools that you can use internally and externally. When considering what will be most helpful for your business, think about what problems you’re looking to solve, who will own the process of implementing AI, whether you have clean, usable data from one single source of truth, and how success will be measured. Delp also advises to look out for red flags when partnering with third-party resources and to consider their approach to transparency and accountability, security and abuse resistance, bias and ethics, data and dependency risk, and culture and long-term viability.
Finally, to keep up with these tools, ensure your business is discoverable. These models go beyond searching by using reason, so, as Delp explained further, “If they can’t reason their way to you, neither can your customer.” Businesses must think about discoverability beyond Google, optimizing for AI-driven search. To do that, you must ensure your website is structured, clear, understandable, and crawlable, opt for natural language, which is prioritized by LLMs, over keywords, keep messaging across your site consistent to create a single source of truth for AI to pull from, and monitor what AI is saying about your company.
Curious about more practical applications for AI in your business? Check out the webinar recording for Brian’s walkthrough of custom Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPTS) and their uses!
This TEXTalk is brought exclusively to HFPA members as part of our educational series.
