Called “STITCH,” the AI assistant can be accessed through a tablet or smartphone and has had such a strong start that Levi’s has rolled it out to more than 70 U.S. Levi’s stores. Gowans intends to bring STITCH to even more locations, add more features, and make it available in additional languages beyond English. Levi’s reports that stores where employees have access to STITCH saw an eight-point improvement in consumer satisfaction versus locations that do not have the technology.
“That gives us some intuition that there’s real value here, and the stylists do seem to be showing up as more knowledgeable and more confident,” says Gowans.
The DTC business accounted for nearly half of Levi’s revenue for the fiscal year ending November 30 and has reported 15 consecutive quarters of positive comparable sales growth, according to the company.
“We’ve seeded this by training our employees, both our corporate employees and our stylists,” says Gowans of his vision that AI implementation shouldn’t be a top-down mandate.
As a result of that broad encouragement, Gowans says that agentic AI use cases have emerged in pockets of the business that he hadn’t anticipated. One area of excitement is within SAP’s enterprise resource planning software system, which is used to integrate processes like finance, manufacturing, and supply chain management.
With half of Levi’s sales still coming from 50,000 points of sale in approximately 120 countries, some smaller retailers still submit their orders as PDF forms sent through email. With AI, Levi’s is now automating that step, rather than requiring a human to manually input all of the order details.
But the “super agent” doesn’t have access to all 800 AI agents at Levi’s, as Gowans says protocols around these systems—including Google’s Agent2Agent and Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol—aren’t yet settled.
“The architecture that we built at the time has since evolved, given what Microsoft and others have laid out as far as protocols,” says Gowans. “This idea of a super agent is something that we’re definitely going to keep building towards to make that employee experience as intuitive as possible.”
He is also keeping a close eye on how generative AI is changing how shoppers discover brands and make their purchases. One piloted application is an AI-enabled styling agent in the Levi’s mobile app, which is currently only available to the company’s U.S.-based employees, and which can give guidance on denim, styling, and make personalized recommendations. Gowans hopes to roll out this tool externally in 2026.
With hundreds of millions of users now on ChatGPT, Gemini, and other chatbots, a new practice has emerged called generative engine optimization, or GEO. Gowans says that Levi’s is working toward making its products available on those channels, but wants to think bigger than simply offering a website link in response to a chatbot prompt.
He also feels that agentic commerce—which is when an AI agent shops on behalf of a consumer—is further in the future for brands like Levi’s, which sells apparel that’s highly subjective when it comes to fit and style. Agentic commerce is likely to be more popular for commodities, like groceries, Gowans asserts.
“It’s a space that we’re paying a lot of attention to,” says Gowans. “I expect that we will be testing something at some point.”
John Kell
