Gap Inc. is optimizing the power of AI to modernize how the company uses its shared platforms to better connect with customers in faster, more personalized ways.
The retailer has a track record of producing marketing and ads that tie fashion into pop culture and nostalgia, featuring music, dance and celebrities in campaigns that can go viral and spark sales. Now the San Francisco-based company is seeking to advance and scale its marketing and messaging through an initiative revealed at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, a five-day event this week encompassing panels, keynoters and awards centered on creative marketing communications and advertising.
The transformation begins with Gap Inc.’s owned marketing channels, where the company is enlisting Zeta Global, the AI Marketing Cloud. Zeta unifies customer data such as purchases and clicks, applies AI to generate insights and activates personalized marketing across channels like email and paid media. Athena by Zeta is a “super-intelligent” AI agent that provides “conversational and actionable answers” to queries that will help marketing workflows, including audience creation, campaign setup, creative generation, simulation and quality assurance. Zeta will enable Gap Inc. to deliver more personalized experiences at scale, unlock more information and insights from customer interactions, and create faster, more coordinated campaigns across key marketing channels, according to the firm.
Gap Inc. also said it is using Google Cloud and its Agent Studio, Agent Engine and Gemini tools “to build a unified, AI-ready data foundation that brings together customer and product intelligence. This foundation is expected to enable faster personalization, better decision-making and continuous learning across marketing content, activations, and e-commerce.”
Google’s advanced Image and Video models like Nano Banana and Veo are also being utilized to create content at scale.
The initiative, Gap Inc. said in its statement, “is designed to turn Gap Inc.’s shared marketing organization into a more scalable, real-time growth engine — one that uses data, AI and agentic capabilities to deliver more relevant content, improve owned marketing channels, strengthen customer retention and remove silos across the marketing ecosystem.” Gap Inc.’s brands — Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy and Athleta — share the corporation’s central marketing organization.
Additionally, Gap Inc. has engaged Publicis Sapient, a global enterprise AI platform and services company, to help it shape a consumer-centric, AI-enabled operating model designed to make marketing more connected, measurable and responsive to customer behavior.
“Gap Inc. has always been a company that shapes culture, and now we have an opportunity to reshape how we show up for customers in a faster, smarter and more personal way,” said Damon Berger, senior vice president, Gap Inc. marketing shared services, in a statement. “This transformation is about bringing together the creativity of our teams with the power of AI — removing silos, unlocking better data, and building a marketing model that learns, adapts and improves with every customer interaction. We are using AI to give our teams more time for strategy, storytelling and the work that creates lasting brand love.”
Gap Inc.’s chief technology officer Sven Gerjets added: “We’re building the future of Gap Inc. with an AI strategy that is human-centered and digitally enabled. This transformation brings together data, AI and agentic capabilities to help us better understand customer intent, move faster as an organization, and create more meaningful experiences across our portfolio of iconic brands.”
The retailer underscored that this AI-powered transformation reflects a broader shift from “a linear, campaign-based marketing model to an AI-enabled marketing flywheel. In this future state, content, activation, commerce and data work together in an always-on system — helping the company better understand customer intent, deliver more relevant storytelling and convert demand wherever it appears.”
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity draws a wide range of speakers and attendees including designers, brands, retailers, social media, marketing and tech firms.
