ASOS says AI shopping will win over casual fashion fans first

ASOS, the UK online fashion retailer, thinks AI shopping will win over casual fashion fans before anyone else. CEO José Antonio Ramos Calamonte says true fashionistas already know what they want. The people who like fashion but ask "How do I do that?" are the ones he expects to love it. Shoppers overall are still slow to adopt it.

What the CEO expects

Calamonte says online shopping today is mostly transactional. Everyone pushes products at shoppers, and the sheer number of options is overwhelming. He argues AI will shift this toward outfits instead of single items, with suggestions personalized to each shopper.

His example is a customer who likes a dress and then wonders how to wear it. He says that level of personal help can make online shopping better than a store visit, because a store cannot match it.

Where AI already saves money

The hard numbers in the interview come from behind the scenes. Calamonte says ASOS uses AI agents, meaning software that carries out a task with little human input. The figures below are his claims.

• Automating invoice matching saves around £1 million a year.
• A Purchase Order Management agent saves 500 hours of work a week.
• A Catalog Agent saves 300 hours a week by reading product data from outside brands.
• He puts the two agents together at almost 1,000 hours a week.

Invoice matching means checking each invoice against what was ordered and received. The purchase order agent handles order timing and changes, which involves suppliers, shippers and customs systems. The catalog agent deals with brands that all send information in different formats.

Creative tools and personal picks

ASOS also uses a tool called AI Studio in its design process. Calamonte says it creates more than 3,000 products a week and that shoppers react positively. He says showing one product differently to different people needs a huge supply of pictures, and this tool helps provide it.

Another feature, The Wardrobe, uses what ASOS knows about a shopper, including items bought from ASOS or elsewhere, to start a shopping journey from something relevant to that person. The interview text available here cuts off before more detail.

What is not clear yet

The shopper-facing side is still early. The article notes that agentic commerce, where AI helps handle buying, has so far been adopted by only a small minority of users. There is no data here on how many ASOS customers use The Wardrobe or how much extra they spend. ASOS is also working with Microsoft on a project called Fashion Frontier to speed up how it creates products, but results beyond the agent savings were not given.

What it means for a shop owner

The proven gains in this story are in chores like invoices, orders and product data. A small retailer could look for similar repetitive tasks first, before spending on flashy shopper features.