Gap Inc. is accelerating its push into artificial intelligence, embedding advanced generative and conversational tech deeper into how online shoppers discover, style, and purchase its apparel across its portfolio of major retail brands.

The retail giant announced a fresh wave of natural-language product discovery features tailored for its Old Navy and Banana Republic brands. Simultaneously, the company revealed a strategic collaboration with Alta Daily, bringing its namesake Gap merchandise directly into an AI-powered third-party styling application where outfits are generated and visualized on personal digital avatars.

These digital announcements coincide with a significant corporate milestone: the 30th anniversary of the launch of Gap Online in 1996. Highlighting this history during SF Tech Week in San Francisco, company leadership is framing artificial intelligence as the logical next evolution in modern digital retail. Beyond conventional search and discovery, Gap confirmed it is actively exploring emerging agentic commerce ecosystems—frameworks where autonomous AI systems can take direct actions, make recommendations, and execute purchases on a shopper’s behalf.

Reflecting on the company’s trajectory, Gap Chief Technology Officer Sven Gerjets noted that thirty years ago, the launch of gap.com fundamentally transformed how customers interacted with retail brands. Today, he explained, artificial intelligence is unlocking a parallel opportunity to completely rethink how people explore, evaluate, and shop for fashion.

Ranked No. 20 in the Top 2000 Database—which tracks North America’s largest online retailers by annual ecommerce revenue—Gap Inc. oversees an extensive portfolio that includes Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, and Athleta.

Gap Adds AI Styling Through Alta Daily

Rather than depending exclusively on traditional keyword search boxes, static product grids, and rigid filtering options, Gap is aggressively experimenting with intelligent tools designed to accurately interpret consumer intent, situational context, and individual stylistic preferences.

As part of this ongoing strategy, the retailer is integrating its signature Gap-brand merchandise into Alta Daily, an AI-driven digital closet and personal styling application. Through this integration, users can seamlessly incorporate Gap items into customized outfit recommendations, visualizing the final ensembles on their personalized Alta avatars. According to the company, this immersive experience bridges the gap between digital retail and dynamic personal styling by introducing AI-driven discovery into a highly visual, individualized environment.

To construct their virtual wardrobes within the app, Alta users can digitize garments already hanging in their real-world closets. Powered by these digital inventories, the application utilizes AI to generate complete daily outfit ideas factoring in variables such as personal aesthetic preferences, daily schedules, and current weather conditions.

This user-centric styling model closely mirrors the principles of agentic commerce that Gap has been examining. Earlier this year, Alta founder and CEO Jenny Wang observed that true agentic commerce requires a robust data layer capable of understanding a shopper’s unique style profile—a data foundation built upon existing wardrobes, historical purchase data, and personal digital avatars.

In addition to the Alta Daily partnership, Gap shoppers continue to discover merchandise via Daydream, an AI-powered fashion platform that allows users to articulate what they are looking for using everyday natural language. Gap initially directed traffic to the daydream.ing platform as a supplementary product discovery channel during the 2005 holiday shopping season.

Old Navy and Banana Republic Add AI Tools

Complementing its external partnerships, Gap is actively revamping the core digital shopping experience for Old Navy and Banana Republic by incorporating conversational AI. These integrated tools empower shoppers to describe what they are looking for in conversational, everyday language, bypassing cumbersome drop-down menus to instantly receive curated product ideas and cohesive recommendations.

By replacing traditional keyword translations and manual filter selections with natural-language dialogue, Gap aims to build systems that intuitively comprehend customer intent, allowing shoppers to transition smoothly from a vague styling idea to specific products matching their initial vision. While the retailer has rolled out these capabilities, it has not yet clarified whether the conversational tools are deployed exclusively on brand websites, mobile applications, or across both digital touchpoints.

Gap Builds Out AI Strategy

These latest rollouts represent just one component of a comprehensive artificial intelligence strategy that Gap has systematically constructed across its broader ecommerce operations. In 2024, the company formally established a dedicated Office of AI. At the time, Gap President and CEO Richard Dickson noted that the office initially focused on early internal use cases centered primarily on employee enablement. Since that foundation was laid, the enterprise has steadily expanded AI deployment into customer service operations, personalized product recommendations, and supply chain fulfillment.

The retail conglomerate has backed this technological shift with increased capital expenditure. During Gap’s earnings call in August, Chief Financial Officer Katrina O’Connell reported that the company’s capital expenditures for fiscal 2026 are projected to reach $650 million, up significantly from $470 million the previous year. A portion of these increased funds is being directly channeled into technology initiatives designed to scale Gap’s internal AI capabilities.

Agentic commerce represents a newer, highly strategic frontier for the retailer. In March, Gap joined as a launch partner for Bold Metrics’ Agent Sizing Protocol. By engaging shoppers in a dialogue regarding fit preferences and measurements, the underlying technology helps conversational shopping agents accurately determine appropriate apparel sizing.

Concurrently, Gap announced its support for Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol. Co-developed with Shopify as an open standard, the protocol connects online merchants directly with advanced AI-powered shopping and checkout experiences. Through this infrastructure, consumers can discover and purchase Gap inventory seamlessly using AI Mode within Google Search and the Gemini application.

These modern protocols build upon foundational AI deployments introduced by the retailer last year. Ahead of the holiday shopping season, Gap implemented personalized recommendations and an intelligent digital assistant via the "Chat with Us" feature across its digital brand properties and mobile apps.

Powering many of these customer-facing and backend innovations is Gap’s strategic partnership with Google Cloud. Established in 2025, the collaboration grants the apparel retailer continuous access to enterprise-grade Google technologies, including the Gemini models, Vertex AI, and BigQuery data analytics.