Sustainability teams are spread thin. Everything from reporting and compliance to developing responsible sourcing strategies and chasing data from hundreds, if not thousands, of sources crosses their desks. Even at multi-million-dollar brands, these teams are often just a handful of people, forced to spend more time with their heads buried in spreadsheets than pushing the kind of agenda-setting sustainability strategies they got into this work to implement. It’s no surprise that the promise of hyper-efficient AI seems so seductive.
Industry insiders say AI can ease the strain on sustainability teams and their supply chain partners alike by automating environmental reporting, improving data quality, repackaging it for different sources and verifying traceability. There are also potential efficiency gains in the supply chain itself through smarter material use and more accurate demand planning. “It’s certainly having a lot of positive outcomes around helping sustainability teams [carry out] reporting, allowing them to focus much more on programming than compliance,” says Annie Agle, vice president of impact and sustainability at US outdoor brand Cotopaxi.
But there’s a catch. The true impact of organizational AI use remains largely undefined. Without careful tracking and measurement, brands could unwittingly increase their footprint via the very technology they are relying on to help decrease it.
“The upsides are very apparent, but we also know there are negative impacts that are not understood yet,” says Agle. “We don’t know the implications of that digital footprint on our GHG [greenhouse gas] measurement.”
To understand how sustainability teams are embedding AI into their operations and how they are approaching such unknowns, Vogue Business spoke to a small sample of brands representing different sizes and market segments. While some are years into AI usage, others are still in the experimental stage, but it’s clear that all consider AI has a role to play in their business going forward.
How Sustainability Teams Are Using AI
H&M says it uses AI across supply chain, logistics, marketing, sales and customer experience, and that AI is supporting its commitment to only produce what it sells. It says it does this by increasingly harnessing the power of AI to optimize how many products to make, where to sell them and when. “It has positive effects on resource consumption, but also in terms of inventory, raw materials and emissions,” the brand explains.
Luxury group Kering, which owns brands including Gucci and Balenciaga, appointed Pierre Houlès as chief digital, AI and IT officer in March 2026. It has been deploying AI across select houses for several years. Like H&M, it is using analytical AI to help forecast demand and optimize inventory levels for each product, says chief sustainability and institutional affairs officer Marie-Claire Daveu. And like Cotopaxi, it is leveraging AI to automate and improve the reliability of reporting, using tools that automatically collect data from Kering sites and intelligently correct it. At the product development level, its Italy-based Material Innovation Lab, which researches and incubates more sustainable materials, developed an eco-design AI agent to provide technical guidance for its design teams. This helps to bridge often siloed design and sustainability teams to ensure the output of one doesn’t compromise the goals of another.
While H&M and Kering have built AI into key parts of their operations over several years, for other brands, AI is mostly about lightening the load. “When it comes to AI, we’re still in the early stages of exploration,” said Everlane CEO Alfred Chang in a statement shared with Vogue Business. “We’re focused on how it might support day-to-day internal processes and time-consuming administrative tasks.”
