From denim to data: American Eagle’s seamless transition into AI-powered retail

With decades of experience at apparel giants like Calvin Klein, Abercrombie & Fitch, The Gap, and now American Eagle, Craig Brommers has seen tech reshape retail time and again. First, it was the rise of ecommerce. Then came the monetization of social media.

Now, in 2025, the hottest trend in fashion — aside from jorts — is AI. Brands are using it for key workflows across the organization, from marketing to merchandising, customer support, and more. At American Eagle, AI is taking on media planning and helping to scale hyper-personalization.

In this fireside chat, WRITER CMO Diego Lomanto sits down with Brommers and WRITER’s retail lead Ranjan Roy. They explore how AI is revolutionizing retail and what it means for the future of fashion commerce.

How retail is remaking itself in the age of AI

AI represents the third seismic shift in Brommers’ retail career. The first was the advent of ecommerce. The second was the monetization of social media. Now comes AI — and the stakes couldn’t be higher. Retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands are falling behind other industries when it comes to adopting and finding success with AI.

Our 2025 enterprise AI adoption survey reveals that only 32% of C-suite leaders from retail and CPG companies have deployed more than three AI applications at scale. Compare this to 60% for healthcare, 66% for financial services, and 53% for technology companies.

For brands like American Eagle, this AI adoption gap presents both a challenge and an opportunity to define what genuine innovation looks like in retail. American Eagle built its brand on authenticity. Aerie pioneered unretouched modeling. American Eagle champions being your “authentic true self.” So how does a brand rooted in realness embrace artificial intelligence?

The answer lies in understanding that core values don’t have to conflict with technological advancement. American Eagle isn’t using AI to replace authenticity — they’re using it to scale authenticity. They’re not abandoning what makes them real. Instead, they’re finding new ways to deliver that realness to millions of customers simultaneously.

Moving past “shiny toy syndrome”

Every industry has fallen victim to the “shiny toy syndrome” with AI. Companies see competitors using AI and feel pressure to invest in the latest tools without understanding how they fit into their business strategy. Resources get wasted, stakeholders become disappointed — and while there may be a few quick wins, they don’t deliver long-term value. Retail is no exception.

“I think in the last year or two there has been some usage of AI for AI’s sake,” Brommers admits. “Like, let’s test something out and either get internal cred or external cred just for doing it.”

But American Eagle has moved beyond the novelty phase. Instead of AI for AI’s sake, they’re focused on AI for the customer’s sake — tackling challenges and opportunities that have existed in retail forever.

Those eternal retail challenges haven’t changed:

• Personalization: Getting the right message to the right customer at the right time — a puzzle marketers have been trying to solve since the dawn of advertising.
• Fit: The age-old retail problem of sizing and inventory. How do you ensure customers find products that actually work for their bodies and lifestyles?
• Internal processes: How do you use the power of a massive, global marketing team to deliver the best outcomes for both the company and the customer?

AI isn’t creating new problems to solve. It’s finally offering solutions to old ones.

Cutting through the content explosion

The numbers tell the story of retail’s content crisis. Half of marketers increased their investment in content marketing in 2024. Take Coca-Cola’s holiday campaign as an example. In 2014, their campaign consisted of holiday packaging, their famous TV ad, and the rollout of Coca-Cola trucks nationwide.

But in 2024, Coca-Cola relied on AI to fuel mass content creation at a scale that would have been impossible in 2014. They generated over 100,000 pieces of original artwork using iconic creative assets from the Coca-Cola archives. They also produced multiple TV films, created extensive social media content, and provided interactive digital experiences.

A decade ago, it might have been okay to have a carefully chosen group of traditional ads. Now, consumers expect a massive ecosystem of personalized, interactive, and user-generated content.

When Brommers was at Calvin Klein, “A campaign meant six beautiful pictures, a Soho billboard, a double page spread in Vogue, high five, and you move on to the next.”

Today, American Eagle produces at least 500 pieces of content per week. And it’s about to get more intense — a major social media platform recently told Brommers that this number will increase by 500% in the coming months.

“We only have so many people, we only have so many tools, and again we cannot and will not lose what makes American Eagle, American Eagle from a brand value perspective,” Brommers explains. “But how are you able to crank up the content machine? You’re gonna have to explore the world of AI.”

Stitching AI into retail operations

When it came to weaving AI throughout their processes, American Eagle took a proactive stance.

“Something clicked in my brain actually,” Brommers says. “AI is going to happen. Do you want AI to happen to us, or AI to happen with us?”

They chose the latter.

Navigating the human side of AI transformation

AI adoption is more about the people than it is the technology. Instead of issuing top-down mandates, American Eagle turned AI adoption into a team sport. They created an AI marketing council with mixed seniority levels — from fresh-faced coordinators to seasoned directors. They wanted to make it clear that this wasn’t something happening to them, it’s something they were building together.

“The critical thing is that the team owned it,” Brommers says. “Like I personally feel like if this is a push down mentality from an ivory tower, this will not work. I think the reality is at American Eagle, my team wants to be the best damn retail marketing team in the world.”

And once the team started seeing real results, the skeptics became believers. The proof was in the performance.

“My team has changed the mindset of my CFO for marketing as an expense center to marketing as a profit center,” Brommers says. “And AI has been a fundamental game changer in that evolution.”

When your CFO starts seeing marketing as a profit driver instead of a cost center, you know you’re doing something right.

Using AI as a creative superpower

Brommers believes that for customer-facing creative assets, AI works best when it’s transparently artificial. The AI-generated quality should become part of the creative appeal rather than trying to pass as human-made content. But he emphasizes that AI’s role in creativity goes well beyond just generating final content — it’s transforming how his team brainstorms, iterates on concepts, and scales their ideas.

Scaling the mundane

With 34,000 SKUs on their website at any given time, writing product descriptions was eating up valuable creative time. Now AI handles the repetitive copy work, freeing human writers to focus on brand-defining creative campaigns.

Media planning at scale

40% of their media budget is now AI-planned, allowing the team to be, as Brommers puts it, “more creative, more innovative, and smarter” in their placement strategy. AI handles optimization at impossible-to-human scales.

Bringing impossible ideas to life

Did you see American Eagle’s viral Statue of Liberty in jorts campaign? That AI-enabled creative stunt drove a 250% increase in jort searches on their site.

“[It was] so obviously tech-enabled, that’s why it cut through,” Brommers explains.

​​Preparing for AI’s exponential impact on business

The pace of AI evolution is accelerating at a rate that makes even seasoned executives dizzy. Brommers admits he can’t fully grasp what’s coming next, and that honesty might be his biggest competitive advantage.

“My gut is that this year will feel like five years, will feel like 10 years will then feel like 20 years,” Brommers says. “I just think that this exponential momentum will take shape and so it will change everything that we are doing in my industry likely.”

That’s why Brommers pushes his team to embrace failure as much as success. When things are moving this fast, the biggest risk is standing still. Companies that spend too much time perfecting their AI strategy will find themselves lapped by competitors who jumped in and learned by doing.

“I have looked myself in the mirror saying, ‘You know what, if I don’t change, I don’t have a job in a couple years,’” Brommers admits.

Key lessons for leaders navigating AI transformation

The roadmap for AI success requires a fundamental shift in how leaders approach learning and risk. For example, curiosity isn’t optional anymore.

“If you are not curious in the era of AI, I think you’re in trouble very, very quick,” Brommers says. The leaders thriving right now are the ones asking questions, not the ones pretending they have all the answers.

That means admitting what you don’t know. Brommers has weekly learning sessions behind closed doors — a humble acknowledgment that even C-suite executives need to keep studying. There’s no shame in admitting knowledge gaps when the landscape is shifting this rapidly.

It also means creating psychological safety for experimentation. Teams need permission to fail forward. The companies winning with AI aren’t the ones with perfect strategies — they’re the ones comfortable with imperfect execution that gets better over time.

The view from the tech side

WRITER’s retail industry lead Ranjan Roy brings a unique perspective to these challenges, having experienced them firsthand as a WRITER customer at Adore Me before joining the company. From the technology side, he sees the same pain points that Brommers highlighted — operational efficiency and creative breakthrough moments. The sweet spot for AI implementation hits both. It saves time and money on routine tasks while enabling teams to tackle previously impossible creative challenges.

Roy says that companies just starting their AI journey need to hunt for quick wins that deliver high value and high impact. Product pages are the perfect example. It’s a use case Roy did at Adore Me with WRITER before ChatGPT was even launched.

The key is showing ROI early and often. Quick wins build momentum and buy-in from stakeholders who might otherwise be skeptical. When teams see immediate results, they become champions for broader AI adoption.

Building successful AI agents

Mastering your core business processes is the secret to successful AI implementation. “Our CEO May [Habib] likes to say process mapping is the new prompt engineering, and I really believe it,” Roy says.

This means involving actual stakeholders from the beginning, whoever the AI agent is going to affect. The people closest to the work understand its nuances best, and their input is crucial for building systems that actually work in practice, not just in theory.

That’s where no-code layers like in WRITER AI Studio become game-changers. They put control directly in the hands of business users who understand the brand and business processes intimately.

“That prompt is a living breathing thing and you can iterate on it, you see a change in consumer sentiment, you change the prompt, you don’t have to rebuild the system, you don’t have to go into the code and figure out how to change the script,” Roy says.

The people who understand the brand best are the ones building the controls for the system. They can adjust tone, update messaging, and refine outputs without waiting for developers or rebuilding entire systems. The AI handles the heavy lifting, but human expertise guides the direction.

This user-centric approach ensures that AI agents work the way your business operates, with all its unique requirements and brand standards intact.

Retail’s new playbook has AI at the center

“I would challenge any CMO and his or her team to say, hey, the dawn of AI is not here, that was actually yesterday,” Brommers says. “Today we are now actively using these tools to help pave our future.”

American Eagle’s transformation shows what’s possible when you approach AI with the right mindset — curiosity over caution, experimentation over perfection, and teams over technology. And retailers can start building their AI HQ with WRITER today.

Want to dive deeper into American Eagle’s AI strategy? Watch the full fireside chat to learn more about how brands are connecting with customers, optimizing operations, and driving growth with AI.