Is Stitch Fix an Artificial Intelligence IPO?
While people have been falling all over themselves to talk about what’s under the hood of the Stitch Fix CEO, we’re more interested in what’s under the hood of a company that was featured in our recent article titled AI Becomes Fashionable with these 10 Startups. While there was lots of media coverage about the “artificial intelligence” component of Stitch Fix prior to their IPO, people seem to have lost track of that now that the S-1 has been filed. Even the company seems to be underplaying their AI technology as a cursory look through the S-1 shows not a single mention of terms like “artificial intelligence” or “deep learning”. As it turns out though, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
As investors, we’re keenly interested in companies that are using AI as a competitive advantage so they can generate efficiencies that result in better bottom line numbers and more money in our pockets. We’re also aware that now we’re seeing all kinds of companies claiming to “use AI” when in fact it seems to be more of an afterthought rather than a core focus. Just because you use some NLP algorithms to screen scrape a few web pages doesn’t make you an AI leader. This is why we’re going to take a closer look at Stitch Fix in the context of what they are actually doing with artificial intelligence.
