Gap Bets on AI-Native Commerce, Why Transformation Stalls, Smart Fabrics from Rare Earths
Gap embeds AI fit and prepares for agent-led commerce; Kalypso finds brands stuck turning tech into outcomes; smart fabrics with rare earth tech.
Gap Rolls Out AI Fit Tools and Agent-Ready Commerce Infrastructure
Gap Inc. is introducing two AI-driven upgrades to its online shopping experience: personalised fit recommendations powered by Bold Metrics and support for Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). The sizing tool embeds predictive fit guidance directly into conversational interfaces, replacing static size charts with dynamic, personalised recommendations. At the same time, UCP enables Gap’s products to appear accurately (and be purchased instantly) within AI environments like Google Search’s AI Mode and Gemini, positioning the retailer for a shift towards agent-led commerce.
Why it matters: Gap is rebuilding two of the biggest friction points in fashion e-commerce: fit and checkout. By aligning with protocols like UCP, Gap is ensuring its catalogue is “AI-native” and ready for a world where discovery and transactions happen outside its own channels. The risk? Commerce moves into third-party agents, turning distribution into a dependency. Just last week we reported on Walmart who found that in-chat checkout underperformed. It will be interesting to see whether in tackling fit confidence, Gap can achieve better results.
Kalypso’s 2026 Retail Research Reveals Why Transformation Is Stalling
Kalypso’s latest retail research finds a familiar pattern: fashion brands are investing heavily in technology, but struggling to translate it into meaningful change. The 2026 report shifts focus away from tools toward operating models, highlighting misaligned decision-making, weak data foundations, and transformation programmes that prioritise adoption over outcomes. It reframes digital product creation (DPC) as an end-to-end way of working rather than a 3D toolset, while positioning AI across three stages: assistive, applied, and agentic, with most brands still stuck at the first.
Michael Ratcliffe
Why it matters: This is less a technology story than a reality check. After a decade of investment, the bottleneck remains execution - fashion still has a coordination problem. Until brands fix decision rights, data trust, and how work actually flows, for many, AI and DPC will remain expensive experiments rather than operational advantages. Transformation isn’t fulfilling its potential not because the tech doesn’t work but because organisations still aren’t built to use it.
Rare Earths Power the Next Wave of Smart Fabrics
Smart fabrics are moving beyond passive performance into active systems that sense and respond to the body, tracking movement, monitoring biometrics, and delivering feedback through embedded electronics. Much of this functionality depends on rare earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium, which enable miniaturised motors, magnetic connectors, and optical components within removable modules. The result is a new design paradigm: garments that combine textile comfort with hardware-level capability, where washability, durability, and power efficiency become core engineering challenges.
Dustin
Why it matters: A decade ago, PI remembers being blown away by projects like The Unseen (worth checking out Lauren Bowker's talk for PI in Hong Kong which we've put at the bottom of this post ↓ ) which made smart textiles feel inevitable, yet most never escaped the prototype phase. The question isn’t whether this is impressive, it’s whether it’s commercially viable at scale. Between fragile supply chains, washability constraints, and unclear consumer demand, smart fabrics still feel closer to niche utility than everyday wardrobe. The likely path forward isn’t “every garment becomes smart,” but targeted use cases - health, safety, performance - where the value outweighs the complexity. The rest of fashion may simply opt out.