rlier this year to enable online shoppers to view items of clothing on diverse models to better picture what it might look like on them. At a time when consumers are conscious of spending, especially in the lead-up to the holiday period, offering more value through tailored customer experiences for free is key to getting consumers to purchase through certain retail channels. AI personal shopper and stylist in your pocket Mys Tyler is an app that uses a combination of AI and human-based recommendations from its community to match users with creators and professionals who share similar body stats. The idea is that users can discover brands and styles that will look good on them, and be inspired to make a purchase outside of the app. “We don’t hold stock, handle payments or shipping. We’re a technology platform,” Mys Tyler CEO and founder Sarah Neill told Inside Retail. The app plays a key role in increasing overall customer satisfaction within the online fashion retail space, which results in purchases that are significantly less likely to be returned.  Neill is on a mission to “disrupt the fashion industry’s $1 trillion fit issue” and empower individuals to feel confident in the clothes.  She started Mys Tyler after seeing a“huge amount of inefficiency” within an industry that produces over 100 billion garments per year, where as much as 30 per cent are never sold, and 40 per cent of what is sold is returned. In the case of Mys Tyler, AI technology allows for hyper-personalisation and curation, much like a personal shopper and stylist would provide, but it is free of charge to the consumer and available 24/7 at a large scale through an app. Opportunity to grow with a holistic approach Since launching in 2020, Mys Tyler has over 500,000 downloads globally and catalogues products across 7,500 retailers and counting. Revenue generated through affiliate partnerships with retailers is shared on a commission basis with the app’s Fashion Contributors. Currently 35 per cent of brands tagged are affiliates of the platform. In 2022, Mys Tyler interviewed 1,000 women and the results showed that only one in four women are body confident and that 89 per cent of women feel more confident in themselves when they like what they’re wearing; yet, only 15 per cent wear clothes every day that make them feel good. Half of these women found clothes didn’t meet expectations after seeing them on models and 82 per cent of women recently had issues finding clothes that fit. Not only are consumers dissatisfied by the status quo in fashion, previous Storyblok research suggests that e-commerce companies are losing billions in revenue, with 60 per cent of consumers abandoning purchases due to non-optimised customer experience. There is a big opportunity for AI technology to enhance the online retail experience for consumers and create a more sustainable future in the fashion retail space, as Mys Tyler’s approach to incorporating AI technology shows.  Hyper-personalisation and curation allow for consumers to make more conscious decisions when purchasing, resulting in fewer returns and less deadstock that retailers have to dispose of, which creates associated costs at various levels of the supply chain, including shipping, waste disposal, customer care and human resources. Returns through the Mys Tyler platform are less than 5 per cent, compared to an industry average of up to 40 per cent, according to the platform. Innovation in the virtual “try-on” space and enhanced customer experience is a priority for the e-commerce fashion industry and AI technology is a means to do so on a large scale. “Our mission has always been to deliver a hyper-personalised experience, for which we’ve collected a lot of data, this has positioned us perfectly to leverage emerging technologies to deliver more value to our users,” Neill said.  “We’ll be using Vertex AI, Google’s generative AI platform, with prompt engineering to bring this idea to market and we’re excited for the hyper personalised experience AI will bring to our app users.” One hundred billion garments are produced by the fashion industry each year, 30 per cent of which is never sold and 40 per cent of what is sold is returned.  App update Mys Tyler’s AI stylist is now live, with phase two set to launch in early 2024. Continuously improving the shopping experience through innovation is at the forefront of how the app aims to achieve the goal of empowering its community through amplifying diversity.