Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the use of computer technology to model intelligent behavior with minimal

human interaction.

Technological advancements have evolved over the years bringing about dramatic changes to the world
as we know it. To-date these leaps have been the critical if not the main drivers of consumer-
consumption behavior. In this regard, AI has emerged as a significant frontier of technical innovation and
has begun to be exploited as a new application in the fashion sense.

Technologies such as smart in-store technology, mass-customization technologies, virtual personal

Through these, consumers are able to purchase (and sell) products from the comfort of their home,
which is referred to as ‘Online Shopping’, although it has proven to be convenient and effective there are
some underlying flaws especially when purchasing clothing items and accessories such as realizing that
what you’ve ordered is not as good-looking as you thought it would be. However, all is not lost our retail
store SHAPE bring you an opportunity to have a virtual fitting room where you can get a virtual
experience through the incorporation of “FIT ME NOW”, an AI tool/system that allows the consumer to
fit potential outfits and accessories before purchasing them.
1.1The business we have created is a clothing-retail company call SHAPE that offers sustainable, trendy
fashion and quality for men, women, teenagers, and children.

The company started out with a physical store that was then franchised all over South Africa which called
for an online presence to allow consumers to purchase their items online. To help keep the business
ahead of its competitors, we have decided to adopt an AI tool for the online store called “FIT ME NOW”

Customers will be able to try on clothes, shoes, and accessories directly on the website using AI that will
scan images of their body and use their body measurements to create a similar body shape to theirs so
they can see how the clothing items they are shopping for will look on them. This reduces the
disappointment of buying an outfit and realizing it does not suit you as well as it suited the model on the
website.

During and after the Covid-19 pandemic the world saw a huge increase in e-commerce, subsequent
studies have shown that people still prefer shopping online. This will reposition us in the marketplace
because none of our competitors are using this tool yet. Our customers’ benefit from the addition of our
AI tool would be:

 Convenience - Consumers can shop from the comfort of their own homes at any time, with
the confidence that what they receive will fully satisfy them since they already have an idea on
how it will look.
 Less crowds- it is more convenient for people to shop online since there will not be any
queues like there would be at an actual store.
 No return policy- some stores have a no-return policy which doesn’t allow customers to return
items they have purchased regardless of how they look on you which is always a loss for them.
In this case they won’t even have a need to return the items since they will fit perfectly.

The main benefit for the company will be increased online sales and revenue. By implementing this new
feature more people will be enticed to go on our website and try it out and then check the items out
because they like how they look. Other benefits include:

 No reach limitations- Anyone from any part of the country can easily access our clothes.
 No returns- customers won’t have to return items that fit them perfectly which will result to
increased revenue.

Some problems that we could face are delivery costs, crash of the system due to many people
logging on the website, reluctancy- some people are still old-fashioned, and they refuse to try new
things, logistics and a lack of personalized experiences for consumers. Even with the numerous
problems we will face, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages because we are giving
customers an in-depth shopping experience which our competitors are not.

1.2. AI Technology that will be adapted.

The AI Technology that would be adapted is Computer Vision. This field of AI trains computers to capture
and interpret information from image and video data. In our business this will use the pictures that our
customers upload and learn their body type, skin tone and suggest options for them, and it will also
enable them to try the clothes they already chose out and provide feedback by interpreting the image

1.3. Type of data the business has:

 The business has data in which it is both quantitative and qualitative data.
 The data is used to create a more realistic and accurate 3D model of the user, which helps the
virtual fitting room to be more accurate.

QUANTITATIVE DATA
Height of user in meters(m).
Weight of user in kilograms(kg).
Body shape and proportion, such as hip-to-waist in centimeters(cm).
Photos and videos of user’s body.

How the data is processed:

QUALITATIVE DATA
User’s favorite color.
User’s favorite brand of clothes.
User’s favorite pattern in clothes.
What features they like or dislike, and how the experience could be improved.

 The AI uses the 3D model using the data collected to simulate how the clothes would look and fit
on the person.
 The is collected and stored securely and users need to give their consent to the data collection.
 Business is clear on how the data is being used and gives users the option to opt out of the data
collection or delete their data if they want to.

Quantitative data
The first step in the process is to ask, where the customers are going to put in their body measurements
and photos of their bodies which are going to be scanned using 3D body scanning that is going to allow a
more accurate fit of the virtual clothes and see how they look on them. It will include previous
purchases, view items, and browsing behavior. This forms part of the descriptive data analysis.

It will be therefore processed and cleaned from misspellings, redundancies, and irrelevances. The
redundant data is eliminated and cleaned because there may be duplicates or trends such as which
items are bought the most, many customers with similar body types which will make us ensure that we
have stock for that body size and fit. Through surveys we can get customers’ views on the items they
bought and didn’t buy.
 The data now will be transformed into a visual for a simple understanding of the complex data. It will
therefore be shared with the team members and stakeholders, helping them in making good decisions
on how they going to make the customers items. The last step is to act after sharing the data,
stakeholders will discuss the way forward on whether to the items must be made or not.

Qualitative data
The business will use natural language processing (NLP), a type of AI that understands human language)
to extract information about favorite colors, brands, and patterns from the user feedback. This will be
done using named entity recognition, which is a type of NLP that can identify and categorize specific
pieces of information, like colors and brands. The business will use machine learning algorithms to
analyze the extracted information and identify common patterns or trends. The business will carefully
protect the privacy of its users and ensure that the data is anonymized and secure.

1.4. Policies in AI are important to provide guidelines on how employees will be trained on how to use
the AI, including prohibited activities. They also ensure that organizations actively address and mitigate
these biases while promoting equality and fairness. Policies should cover data privacy, transparency,
accountability, bias and provide guidelines on how to handle ethical dilemmas.

Data privacy policies help establish ways to deal with issues that arise from how businesses obtain and
processes data while following regulations during data transfers. Since most websites collect purchase
information, including payment card numbers, billing, shipping addresses, IP address, mobile carrier,
time zone settings, model of the device, and operating system there might be legal complications with
the POPI Act. To mitigate this, we could build in a feature in our AI system that will have storage with
built in data protection, encryption, endpoint protection and firewalls that are constantly updated.

The AI should comply with regulations, as the online clothing industry would include data privacy and
consumer protection as sensitive information is dealt with regularly like credit card numbers and
customer addresses. The is a policy to ensure ethical and responsible use of the AI aligns with our
business as we aim to improve customer experience not unfairly take all the employment away as
placing an AI system as a replacement for human employees is unethical and an irresponsible use of
technology and this could lead to reputational damage or legal implications. This can be mitigated by
creating a governance framework for our AI where we will set out rules on how our AI will be used and
managed by our business.

Reasonable efforts can be made to inform customers that they are currently using a virtual try-on and
how the data collected will be used. The online service must ensure that consent has been acquired
from the customer before using their images. Place guidelines when using the virtual try-on technology
to assure realistic body images are encouraged and limitations on usage to prevent misuse, harm, and
biasness. This will help avoid promoting any negative annotation on other social platforms regarding the
body models used.

Our business should operate in a sustainable manner, and this can be enforced by having a sustainability
policy that outlines our commitment to practices and standards designed to promote environmentally
and socially responsible operations. Since we have a clothes manufacturing business that will be sold
through our website with the AI system, we must show our consumers that we do recycle our fabrics to
minimize wastage and pollution as most of our competitors just burn the used fabrics leading to air
pollution or they take the to landfills which are not environmentally friendly.

Images generated or body images uses by virtual try-on technology which could promote offensive and
harmful content and we could get sued by consumers if they feel we are promoting offensive content
which could tarnish our reputation leading to a loss of revenue. To avoid this, we need to regularly
update the system or test it to ensure that it’s free from bias and discrimination or we could develop a
feature in our AI that will be able to disable offensive results.

Virtual Try-on technology can bring back inaccurate results of clothing or body model and we can be
sued for misleading the consumers so we should have a specific policy that will help us deal with
problems like this brought up by consumers. A solution to this possible legal complication could be
creating transparency by using different elements for customer to be able to differentiate between
content generated by the technology or human- generate.

Never worry about your purchases not looking good on you anymore. Shop with SHAPE to be able to
access the fit me now feature and see how you will look right there and there. Run don’t walk to our
website to find your spring outfits now.

References

https://writer.com/blog/corporate-ai-policy/ - :~:text=A%20corporate%20AI%20policy%20is%20a%20set
%20of%20guidelines%20and,prevent%20data%20bias%20and%20discrimination.