Levi’s Embraces AI With Microsoft for Retail Transformation

Levi Strauss & Co. has been AI curious for years — and now it’s jumping into the new machine age and starting to retool both the back and front of house. 

The denim giant unveiled three new AI initiatives on Monday that will start to change everything from how it works with vendors to how new sales associates get up to speed on their 501s. 

They include: 

That puts Levi’s somewhere along the leading edge of AI adoption — a change that could enhance the shopping experience and drive corporate efficiency, but also promises to dramatically change the workplace. 

Jason Gowans, chief digital and technology officer, said Levi’s needs to keep up with the new technology.

“If you look at things like data center growth, [graphics processing unit] production, electricity consumption, and also expansion of GPT[-based AI] capabilities, all of that lives on an exponential curve,” Gowans told WWD in an interview. “Your average brand typically lives on this very slow-growth, linear curve. 

“If you think about what’s going to happen into the future — 2027, 2028 — for every day that you are not jumping onto that exponential curve, the gap is going to widen,” he said. 

If the 21st century was already an age of anxiety, AI has supercharged that need to keep up, which is being acutely felt both by the executives steering companies and the employees that power them. 

The move to a much more AI-integrated approach to everything is a change that seems to be coming like it or not and despite all the disaster-movie rhetoric about computers taking over the world. 

But Gowans sees a future where people are empowered in new and exciting ways. 

“It really ultimately is about amplifying human potential,” he said. “Whether you’re a designer or a software engineer, AI is just allowing us to do far more than we ever thought we could do by ourselves alone. We see it as a unique opportunity to reimagine how we work and engage with our fans.”

Levi’s has been leaning in on technology in recent years, initiating in-house Machine Learning Bootcamp intended to give more workers data science skills that can be applied across the business. 

With the introduction of the Stitch platform to help store workers, that bootcamp approach is paying dividends. 

Michael Buchanan, who’s worked at Levi’s for nearly two decades and spent much of that time in the store, went through the bootcamp and moved on to the company’s data and analytics team. 

Buchanan worked up Stitch at an “internal hackathon” 

“If we’re approached with a question, we never want to say, ‘I don’t know,’” Buchanan said in a statement, relying on his in-store expertise. “It’s this mindset which sparked the idea that we needed a new solution, not only to help our consumers but also to strengthen our teams.”

With AI moving at a pace that can flummox even the savviest companies, it makes sense that Levi’s would want to hook up with a tech giant like Microsoft.

Levi’s new super-agent is built on an agentic framework embedded in the Microsoft Teams suite and powered by the Azure cloud platform.  

When the new set-up is installed next year, sub-agents across IT, human resources, operations and other aspects of the company will feed up to the super agent, which will act as an “intelligent intermediary,” according to the company. 

Gowans pointed to the transformation coming to Levi’s financial operations function as an example of what’s happening across the organization. 

“We work in more than a hundred countries across more than 50,000 different points of distribution and work with very many different retailers all around the world,” he said. “There is accounts receivable, accounts payable; not all of those orders that we receive from wholesale partners around the world are automated. Many of them are manual.

“We’ve been using AI to really think about all those processes, decompose them, figure out where there are opportunities to automate and speed up how work gets done,” he said.

Levi’s has 1,100 standard operating procedures in the area, which AI broke down into 19,000 different steps and found that 35 percent of the steps were just data entry. 

That created what Gowans said was a “roadmap” for how the company would start to automate its financial operations. 

Making sense out of such a complex system is a job that humans could do eventually, but that AI can do much more quickly. 

“It really is just speeding us up to work at the speed of retail,” Gowans said. “Here’s the purchase order, and Levi’s needs to be able to ingest that. And there’s a handshake, an automatic handshake that does all the work. In the past, that was a manual process to set up essentially these relationships. And that takes time. And now through AI, we have the ability to automate that, and we are now serving these wholesale customers much faster.” 

But Levi’s is being careful that the AI doesn’t start hallucinating while buttoning up its financial operations. 

“AI is obviously doing much of the heavy lifting; ultimately it’s a human that’s signing off on these activities,” he said. “That being said, we all know humans have never been infallible either. 

“We are cognizant of where we can afford to have some error, and we’re also cognizant of where we really got to make sure that this thing is a hundred percent accurate,” he said. “Then we tend to go much more slowly. We tend to be much more verbose in the testing that we do, and we almost certainly have a human in the loop.” 

The human equation isn’t being lost, he said, but recalculated. 

“It’s less about jobs going away, and it’s much more about, how do we start to speed up the pace at which we’re able to work?” 

Michelle Gass, president and chief executive officer of Levi’s, said: “AI represents a tremendous opportunity for us and is a key unlock as we rewire how we work — from our stores to our corporate offices. As we roll out these tools in 2026, our teams will gain faster access to information and insights that help them work more efficiently and ultimately serve our fans better across every channel, every day. The new capabilities we are developing, along with the partnerships we’ve established, will accelerate our journey to become a $10 billion retailer and set new benchmarks for best-in-class agility, operational excellence and innovation in global retail.”