Fashion Forecasting: Arti Zeighami on Implementing AI at H&M Group

**Sam Ransbotham** (0:02)
When you're putting a new tire on your car, you don't want to tighten one bolt all the way and then tighten the rest. You want to tighten them all a little bit and continuously tighten. What does that have to do with artificial intelligence and fashion? Find out today when we talk with Arti Zeighami from H&M.
Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast on artificial intelligence and business. Each week, we introduce you to someone innovating with AI. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Information Systems at Boston College, and I'm also the guest editor for the AI and Business Strategy Big Idea Program at MIT Sloan Management Review.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (0:38)
And I'm Shervin Khodabandeh, senior partner with BCG, and I co-lead BCG's AI practice in North America. And together, BCG and MIT Smr have been researching AI for four years, interviewing hundreds of practitioners and surveying thousands of companies on what it takes to build and deploy and scale AI capabilities and really transform the way organizations operate.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:08)
Today, we're talking with Arti Zeighami, who leads artificial intelligence at H&M.
Arti's joining us from Stockholm. Welcome, Arti.

**Arti Zeighami** (1:16)
Thank you. Thank you very much for having me here.

**Sam Ransbotham** (1:19)
Really, we'd like to hear a little bit about your background. Why don't we start there? How did you get interested in artificial intelligence? And for a podcast today, I'm actually wearing a nice shirt because we're talking with a fashion person. Even though this is audio, I can assure everyone that I look fabulous.
How did you get interested in artificial intelligence though?

**Arti Zeighami** (1:38)
I think my interest in the area started many years ago as a young teenager when like a lot of people I was studying math and physics and loved all those stuff. And I read these books by Isaac Asimov, the science fiction author. And I was reading about this theory that he had about psychohistory that he called it, which was about how you can start somehow predict the future by looking at the past and apply mathematical models on top of that. And I was so intrigued by that when I was 15, 16, or 17 I was like, this is something amazing. This guy made it up by himself. And what if this can be for true? What if I could work with something like this in the future?
And it took me a long time to get there because there between school came and then I started working as a consultant and I was doing programming, I was in architecture, I was in business developer, I was a strategist.
I did different startups and all that. And then I ended up in a fashion retailer.
Then I got this opportunity to start looking at advanced analytics and AI as a capability. I don't have a formal data science background. I do have an engineering background from engineering school. I even started business school parallel to that. And then life brought me here. Somehow, it's like the universe brought me to artificial intelligence. And somebody made fun of his, yeah, your name is Arti. That's Arti, artificial. It's probably that's why. So yeah.
I don't have any-

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (3:05)
That's pretty funny.

**Arti Zeighami** (3:07)
Yeah, I always joke about that.

**Shervin Khodabandeh** (3:09)
Joking aside, I would say what you described as a diverse and colorful background and experiences, architect, engineer, strategist.
How does it help you now, that diversity versus if you'd been all focused? Do you have a point of view on that?

**Arti Zeighami** (3:26)
Yeah, absolutely. I think it has helped me tremendously. I think one of the major parts of working with introducing a new capability such as AI into an old industry, like a retail, which have done certain things in a certain way for so many years, is about shift of mindset. It's about transforming people's way of thinking. It's very little AI, it's very little tech.
I usually refer to it as 10% AI, 20% tech, but it's 70% people and processes. So you try to shift people into thinking differently, to ask different questions, to look at the world differently and working as a consultant. I think that was one of the biggest help I ever got because as a consultant, you always make sure that it's not about you shining, it's about your clients shining.
And it's about making them the heroes of the day. And it's always been about that. And I kind of sort of even internally with my colleagues and my peers always said, listen, let's make sure that we are almost like internal consultants because it's about helping our colleagues to achieve their goals. Ultimately, if you're talking about transforming people's mindset, it's about the rhetorics, is how you make them understand what you're trying to do and how you make them understand what you're trying to help them with. So, it goes back to the Greeks, rhetorics, ethos, Paltos, logos.