#240: How David’s Bridal Is Rebuilding a 76-Year-Old Business Around AI

Elina Vilk (0:00)

How do we even get started? What do I even like? When I got married years ago, I would go out and I'd spend hundreds of dollars on wedding magazines, and I would cut things out and I'd build myself a little inspiration vision board.

We were able to solve that problem state with AI in under two minutes.

Mike Kaput (0:15)

Welcome to AI Transformations, a special series from The Artificial Intelligence Show. I'm Mike Kaput, Chief Content Officer at SmarterX and Marketing AI Institute, and I'll be your host. Every business's AI journey looks different. In each of these episodes, I sit down with leaders who have lived through real AI transformation, including the actual stories, the pain points that push them to act, the moment things started to click, and the results they can point to today. So join us as we accelerate AI literacy for all, as part of our AI Transformations series.

Welcome everyone to Episode 240 of The Artificial Intelligence Show. I am Mike Kaput, co-host of The Artificial Intelligence Show and Chief Content Officer here at SmarterX. We are again doing something a little different than your regularly scheduled programming. This is a special episode in a series we're running called AI Transformations, presented by Google Cloud. And in this series, if you have been following along with the amazing episodes we've put out so far, we are spotlighting how real companies are driving real change using AI. So in each episode, we'll explore how leaders at some of the world's most innovative companies are using AI to transform how their teams, departments or entire organizations work. We'll look at what sparked the transformation, how the journey unfolded, what got messy along the way, and kind of what results AI is starting to unlock for businesses. And we do all that by interviewing leaders firsthand right here on the show. That includes Elina Vilk and Mike Ball from David's Bridal, who are here with me today. Much more on both of them in just one minute. Now, the reason we're doing this series in partnership with our friends at Google Cloud is simple, which is AI transformation can feel really abstract. Everyone talks it up, but far fewer people are showing what it looks like in practice inside real companies. So we want to actually make AI transformation much more concrete and show you how other leaders are approaching it. So with that, I'm going to dive in to today's episode. And in just a second here, talk with Elina and Mike. Before we do, today's episode is brought to you by Gemini Enterprise. So businesses of every shape and size are turning to AI. They are learning how to move faster, do more and improve their performance. But you can't just hand your data over to any platform. You need a trusted partner with years of experience. And that's where Gemini Enterprise comes in. Gemini Enterprise helps you build sophisticated AI agents that can connect with your business data while also keeping it protected by world-class security and governance. So there's no more compromising between performance and protection. So go get started today at cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise.

That's cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise.

All right, I'm very excited for this one. Today we are talking with Elina Vilk, president and chief business officer at David's Bridal, and Mike Ball, who is the company's head of product. So founded back in 1950, David's Bridal is best known for wedding attire. But today its business also spans wedding planning, digital commerce, loyalty and services for wedding vendors. Now, Elina and Mike are here because David's is working to turn a company built around the dress into a platform supporting the broader wedding journey. That's a transformation it calls IELTS algorithm that we're going to talk about quite a bit. And this work has centered on expanding their system Pearl, which is a planning platform and vendor marketplace into Pearl Planner, which is an AI powered experience designed to help couples navigate the more than 300 connected tasks involved in planning a wedding. So Pearl can actually turn a couple's date, style, budget and preferences into a personalized plan that evolves with them. And it moves far beyond chat by helping couples do everything from manage timelines, budgets, decisions, and vendor needs and more throughout the planning process. Now, along the way of building out this AI native system and capabilities, David's has also changed how its own teams work. So the company actually starts looking at each team's biggest problems, trains its leaders, builds targeted solutions, and encourages employees to rethink workflows and what their job could become, thanks to what AI enables. Now, David's today is expanding its AI platform to wedding businesses through a vendor side experience as well, and that is being built on Google Cloud. We're going to talk about all that in this conversation and more. Elina, Mike, welcome to the show.