AI, Creativity & the Future of Footwear | STRIDE USA 2026

Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for joining. A lot of similar faces from last year and some new faces this year. So really excited to talk with you all today about AI guardrails, gains, and growing pains. Some of our favorite topics. I guess briefly we'll just go through the lineup here. A quick introduction from the panel would be awesome, and I'll hand it off to Justin.

Okay.

Yeah.

Hi, I'm Justin Schlathauer, Director of Digital Product Creation at Under Armour. So We build all of our assets digitally first, ideally, and every single asset. And then we take those downstream. So it starts with— it's data building. So we do a lot of the data building nowadays, which is very important. And yeah, I've been doing this for 19 years at Under Armour, some of the same missions, same 10YP, and it's spot on, which is pretty scary. But yeah. Yeah.

Awesome. Thank you.

Shawn Lane from Vans, and I oversee digital innovation, AI, and our innovation center, which is a makerspace. And, but previously worked for the past decade all around digital product creation.

Thank you.

Here we go. Scott Labby from Keen. I'm in charge of product innovation and spurhead and partner with the design team.

Thank you.

Jay Grieves. I run design— footwear design at Ariat down in the Bay Area, previously with The North Face and Vans prior to that. I come at it from a design side. I don't really have a digital creation team. And so it's pretty grassrootsy with my team. And we're always just trying out as many new platforms and programs to streamline the process and make it a little bit easier on my design team. But I'm here as kind of a fan and a listener as well. I want to hear from these creatives.

Likewise. Thanks, Jake. I'm also a big fan of all of you. So it's an honor to be up here on this panel today. I'm Erin Bornstein, founder of the Reborn Design Agency for design and development. And we'll hop into some of the questions for today. So first question we have, I'll open it up for you, Scott. It says, at what point do AI guardrails protect the brand and when do they start slowing innovation?

I think they protect the brand as long as you have a, um, concealed team that can really understand how to prompt AI in a way where it's all going to be motifed and spirited towards, towards the brand ethos. Protecting that piece is critical. I think where it can unravel is when you take product and just, we'll say, put it in the machine too quickly. You can really dilute the impact of the brand. And if you don't have folks watching out for the branding piece of it, whether it's marketing and/or your design leadership, it can really be dangerous for the brand and go down a slippery slope.

Definitely. I see that all the time. Jake, do you find similar things with your company and how you kind of protect those guardrails versus slow innovation?

Yeah, I mean, for us, first and foremost, I got to make sure I'm working in a closed-loop system so no one else can can access it. And so I got to work with my IT team, my legal team, make sure we're protected in that respect. And then, I mean, I still use it as just a tool in helping us create. It's still got to go through the same filters. And so the output's only as good as, as the input. And so I think, you know, the initial sketch has got to be spot on. The prompts have to be aligned with the ethos of the brand. And then I'll even put in secondary photos of my own product, legacy product as Scott was talking about earlier, that help kind of guide those prompts. And then we get better results that way.

Yeah, I love that. Sean, do you find you come from a similar standpoint in protecting the brand when you're at like a big hub like VF and a lot of brands to keep in mind in that protection phase?

Yeah, fortunately I don't work on all the other brands, but I do think that I personally don't like guardrails. I just want free access to everything.

Don't we all?

I feel like I have common sense. I'm not going to do anything stupid, but I understand that from a brand you have to kind of think about the legal aspects of it and what you're putting out there to make available potentially to other people to see in advance of it going to market. So I think having a nice governance over letting the tools come in and then making sure that people are aware of what those tools are used for and how they could be used and making sure that we're not doing things that go against, like you mentioned, our brand ethos or our brand identity.

Absolutely. Well, I have another question for you, Sean. Who truly owns AI inside your organization, and is that ownership clear? Clear enough to scale it responsibly?

Again, no guardrails. No, I honestly, uh, it depends on the organization. Smaller companies, I think, you know, you don't need to have full ownership. I think once you give people access, it's giving them those guardrails, the things that they can and can't do. With bigger companies, you need to have a governance, you need to have somebody and make that cross-functional so that you have brand, design, commercial, marketing, kind of all the different groups in there. And then have them kind of vet some of the tools that can come in and make available. At VF, we get no access. It gets cut off at the— when you try to access it, you have to then go through the governance group to get access. Yeah. And so the part I've been fortunate about is that I, I kind of have been able to input like things that they need to be paying attention to into the governance group. So I end up getting a lot more access to things.

Really interesting. Justin, do you have anything to add there?

Yeah, I'd say governance is really important to the protection of— you know, you don't want it to be— I always use it as a wild, wild west. There's a ton of tools, a ton of things you can do, a ton of people with their own ideas. Like, you really want to start from the top of that ladder and set the standards, set the governance, and set the direction too, and like, who's in charge? What problems you're trying to solve. And then it comes back up from the ladder like, hey, we have this problem, help us solve it. And there could be dedicated teammates to doing that portion of here's what we need, and then the governance, working that out, making sure everything is in line with the vision for AI tools. Yeah.

Yeah, really cool. I saw you guys making some faces down there when Sean was saying that he couldn't access things. What do you make of that?

Yeah, I think we're in the same boat, and, you know, we've had to put up those guardrails as well, because when I came away from the last Stride event last year, I mean, so much has changed in the last year, it's been crazy. And there were all these new tools that I was hearing about, and I went back to the office and I started using them all, and I kind of did it wild, wild west, and I was like, I might be exposing the brand here. And that's when I finally went to IT and legal and said, I need some guidance here because I feel like I could get the brand in trouble real quickly. And so now we have similar— we have an AI advisory committee that we've put together. It's cross-functional teams. And then if a new software or some new software gets added or is pitched, we'll have little subcommittees that will try it, whether it's expense reports or if it's email, you know, and then we'll launch it to a larger part of the team.

Same.

We have a committee led by our VP of IT, so he led it, and part of this committee team is members of the board, senior leadership, our founder, myself, and a few other of my peers. And we're on the job training with this whole thing, right? Like, we're just trying to figure it out together. So they put some guardrails in place for sure, for sure, but we do have a lot more options probably than most. But it's been a great journey, and I think as we, as we learn, we'll figure out which, which platforms to kind of embrace. Of course, it's almost becoming geopolitical right now between OpenAI and, and Claude and such. It's, it's, um, it's probably going to make things even more complicated in businesses. Who you're supporting, which side, when AI now is being connected to politics. But at the same time, we'll do— figure out and do the right thing.

Yeah, that's a perfect segue into this next question, which I'll hand over to you, Justin. You know, in a crowded and fast-moving AI tool landscape, how are you deciding which tools enter the workflow and who has the final say?

Yeah, I'm actually becoming very grateful for Under Armour and our, you know, our openness to to the AI, but there's also education involved with that too. You know, there's teammate training to get access to something. You know, you need to go through training. So I think that's very important to have that governance. But how do— I guess that's kind of from the bottom of the ladder up. So it starts with the people, the team that has the issues that need to be solved, presenting them up, and then you know, we need to keep track of those tools. So the top, you know, the IT side, the— our enterprise data management side has to really govern those tools. You don't want a ton of tools. You know, someone— Joe over here might find a tool that is working for him, but, you know, there might be a better tool and one that's more— one that's safer, one that's more enterprise-focused. You know, AI is pretty powerful. It can do a lot of things. There isn't just one good tool, but you need the right suite of tools to complete the objectives. But it does, it starts from the bottom, goes up to the business unit, then to the governance teams, legal.

Yeah, I'd like to ask the same question to you, Sean, and if that's the similar approach you guys have.

Yeah, back to the previous question too, I think I'm a firm believer in applied AI. And so who owns it? I think the people doing the work own it. There just needs to be that governance level. And then from the tool perspective, it's evolving so fast that it's really difficult sometimes to keep up with it. And so when you get tools in and you start to build them into your workflow, suddenly something new and better comes along and you're like, ah, I got to change it. Or the tool itself has changed. I think it's a constant struggle. So being flexible and being aware of what's going on out there and kind of trying to stay connected. I think is really important. And from once you've established a toolset and a company that you wanna work with or a vendor, then it's a matter of building that relationship, building that partnership and kind of establishing the processes internally. 'Cause if you don't have those established, it's the same old thing. Anytime you do a transformation, if you don't have good process, you get poor results.

Yeah, definitely. Scott or Jake, do you have anything to add there about how you guys select your AI tools?

No, no, it was well said. I think we follow the same process.

Awesome. And the next question here, I'll throw it back to you, Justin. Where is AI genuinely saving time in the product workflow today, and where is it just shifting work around?

Okay, I think time savings is kind of obvious when you're talking about language models or like ChatGPT, Copilot, all those. Type of tools where, you know, has access to some sort of information, helps you write emails, you know, helps you organize tasks. That portion is very beneficial. And then you get into like the GenAI portion, which is very beneficial on the creativity side. But one of the drawbacks to that, I'd say, is there's constraints, as you know, constraints in decision-making is always part of the process, I could just go on and on and on. And this doesn't really help it. It gets more creative faster, and then decisions are harder to make sometimes. So I think really diving into that would help some of the process. I say my word of the year for AI is like prescriptive. It needs to be a little more prescriptive in how you do everything.

Yeah, I see you nodding along over there. What do you think of that? Nope, sorry, I was, uh, no, I was asking Scott the question and if he, uh, no, no, sorry, my bad. And, uh, you know, if you think it's just shifting work around, um, it's kind of doing some shifting for sure.

Um, unsolicited prompt, but you know what's, what's helping us move quicker on the product briefing part is the platform called Verve. I talked I talked about it earlier. And they identify your absolute fan. You dump in all the data, and you have all these different assistants. You have an engineer assistant. You have an I&E marketing assistant, et cetera, et cetera. So it's your own little ecosystem of all things product management. So we now can build a brief literally in 10 minutes, as opposed to a couple of weeks. And the research is second to none. I mean, it's just really good. But— there's always a but— That part we're saving time on, but it's getting to that part and after that part that takes a lot more work now, right? Because now that we got that out of the way, the opportunity to build more briefs— again, that whole scarcity thing. We don't want to have too many problems or too many projects, excuse me. But it's creating more work at the back end as opposed to actually building the brief. And from a design perspective, speaking on behalf of my design team, they're also able to concept quicker. So we now have a multitude of options. But because we're so spoiled and we reduce so much lead time there that I noticed we're taking more time at being more analytical on the actual 2D design, whether it's a line drawing as such. So I think we're losing time there even though we're gaining time on the concept.

Yeah, I would totally agree with that. And then to add, I think my teams are creating so much more work so much faster now. It doesn't fit into my normal calendar of sketch review 1, sketch review 2, final design review. I'm finding I need to stop by my designer's desk and have those more informal guest crits or desk crits, sorry, and just review things a little bit more, which is kind of my style anyway. I like that, but they're able to produce things so much more rapid. I need to step up my game as a design leader to, to review them so that they can keep moving forward.

Yeah, absolutely. And something you mentioned too, Scott, about the brief, I just find also that AI can't really fix a bad brief. So it's always a good thing to maybe go back in the process a little bit before diving too far into AI. Sean, do you have anything to add to that in your workflow?

No, I totally lost track of the questions.

Yeah, we'll skip to the next one.

There's too many questions popping up here, so I keep looking up.

Yeah, we do have questions too coming in from the audience, which I'm excited to get to soon. The next question we have is for you, Jake. If AI makes variation effortless, how do you stop infinite iteration from becoming the new bottleneck?

I think it's been an old bottleneck all along. I think, you know, I'm a designer. I'll keep designing till you tell me to put the pencil down. And so it's just a new level of governance. But I think it's an age-old problem that we've had. And for our team, I mean, we have a very strict calendar. And so I know what our deliverables are and when we— and my team knows what we need to deliver on this date and when. And so, you know, if you stick to your guidelines and your plan, I don't care how much you— you produce, you still got to show at design review. So it's an age-old problem. I don't think AI has changed it that much for my team.

I think there's opportunity with that too because there's all the iterations and stuff you can do. But there's also putting the data in. There's the accuracy. Maybe it's something where you could say, Hey, well, here's some of the most accurate answers. Make sure you're hitting these. Does this design hit those? Whether it's materials or whether it's construction or the market or the brief. But I think there could be different ways of thinking about it, maybe not— haven't tapped into yet. But to help those deadlines, it's like, oh, this one hits all those. You're done 2 months early, maybe. But it's just a different way of thinking. About it, which maybe we could explore more.

Yeah, absolutely. When it comes to brand DNA, how do you scale AI without flattening your brand into the same probabilistic output as everybody else? And I know as a lot of AI programs are feeding into the same hub, I think that's a real thing to consider. So I'll open that up to you, Jake. What do you think about that?

I, I think I touched on this a little bit before. Closed-loop systems hopefully, but that, you know, it's only as good as what you've put into it. And so if I'm putting in drawings that have the original brand DNA, if I'm prompting with the verbiage that is the ethos of the brand, and then I'm putting in my legacy product as well, I'm always kind of tweaking those. I bring it back. Out of AI and tweak again in Photoshop and Illustrator, or bring it back into Procreate and sketch back over it. And so it's just become a tool that I use back and forth and I'm learning to use. Did I answer the question?

Yeah, absolutely. I think trying to not come out with the same probabilistic answer as everybody else is a concern to your point. And referencing that brand DNA and bringing into multiple tools can maybe help solve that, is your point. And I know brand DNA, Scott, you mentioned that a lot in your presentation this morning. Are there any extra steps you take to kind of ensure that?

We haven't figured out the hack to pull out of AI, whether it's Procreate or Midjourney or such, that satisfies us on the branding, logo, and placement perspective. We always have to kind of hack it after. We do, which I guess is kind of a good thing, right? You don't want AI to be able to steal the identity. So we definitely have an identity crisis between our relationship with AI on the branding and the marking piece. So we end up doing it the slow-mo way and throw it into Illustrator and carve it out. Yeah.

Awesome.

Same.

Anyone else want to add?

Yeah. I think the— The one thing that it doesn't do is, I think if you go in without clarity, you're gonna get a lot of different results. Sometimes those could be great and you could be like, "Oh, I didn't think of that." But oftentimes you end up in this cycle of like trying to figure it out and you spend too much time trying to do that. And so I think if you have clarity going in, it helps the whole process. So that's what I would say, start with clarity.

Yeah, I agree with that. And it's like having a starting point. Point to and maybe something to go back to, like go back to your starting point and use the information you planned on using in the first place, whether it's an image or a style from someone. I know you could easily, just for fun, recreated a style of one of the designers and created 50 designs and said, hey, look, I can design just like you. I'm like, I'll delete it. It was just a joke.

But everybody's a designer.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not ideal because you still need that creativity portion and being able to go back. You have the tools at hand, but you need to know how to use them, right? I think somebody from Calypso at one of the meetings maybe last year said it's a weapon, and I thought that was pretty awesome. Yeah, it's a weapon. You got to use it, or it can be used against you or with you. Yeah.

Just to add that, I think the acceleration is vastly beyond what we've ever experienced, though. One of the projects that we just recently worked on was to create an entire lookbook from 2D CADs. And we did that in basically 2 weeks. And it was probably about 3 to 4 focus days. And we were able to go through an entire set of iterations. We had clarity up front. That was the key. And we were able to actually create on-model, on-location assets that were very accurate. And that was the other part too, is just that getting that acceleration, making sure that you're accurate along the way, because we've seen some very interesting things come out. Like when we were first doing it, we had another group that, you know, talking about ownership, that did it and they created some really cool visuals. But the shoes were a cross between a Converse and a Vans shoes. So it was like, okay. And it made it all the way through the pipeline until somebody recognized it on the sales team. We were like, oh, that's not good.

So that's a good story. I love that. Well, if anybody else doesn't have anything to add, we can jump to the questions coming in from the audience, which is really exciting. First one, and I encourage more of you out there to submit your questions and I'll start to answer those. First one that came in, how do you ensure your team doesn't overly rely on AI and lose their creativity and curiosity? Anyone like to take that?

I think right now I want them to kind of jump in and over-rely a little bit just so that they adopt it. The democratization of it is really important, and if it's one central team that's always doing the work, then it feels like it's a separate process, and we really want to integrate it. But I do think on the flip side too, you still have to follow the same protocols and processes you have in place that that you might have used with previous software or tools.

[Speaker:CHRIS_BREMER] I'd say recent historically, I haven't seen a designer generate something and like, ah, that's it. We got it. It's always you have an idea in your head, and you're trying to get to that idea, maybe even a little better way, or something you haven't thought about. I just hope we don't lose that side of it, because that's really important. But again, like Sean said, I think really dive in and use the tools. I always say it's like a calculator for creativity. We haven't had that before. But you have to know what to plug in.

Definitely.

I have two words, ubiquity and balance. What I'm most concerned about is pretty soon, and we're just about there now, but definitely by a year from now, everyone's gonna have a hot hand. Everyone's gonna have the best, coolest design there is. So then you get systematically immune to it and it becomes ubiquitous. So balance is my second word in which I would really encourage the teams to take a shot at it first without using AI and just really trying to show their own hand ensure that they have that identity that matches with the brand and their self-emotive interests. And then rely on AI to help the speed part out. But that does concern me for sure.

Yeah, totally agree.

Yeah.

Yeah, the only thing I would definitely second is that one of the general guidelines or rules that I would say I would employ if you're just starting into this never start from a prompt. Always start from an actual drawing of some sort that you can kind of follow back to the origin of what got created.

I love that. Great advice. We'll jump into the next question here. And it says here from Gage, with all of your brands having such a rich, rich history, how can AI as a tool align with the soul of the brand during the ideation process? That's a great question. Anyone want to jump into that?

I feel like it sort of relates to the last question, but I think having the— I kind of forgot what I was going to say. I thought it was going to be profound. This is what I told Michael I was going to do. Yeah, I have something really profound. I missed it. It cut out. Sorry. Yeah, when making decisions with that, I think starting from a sketch, I think it can really help you in your brand identity too if you have the facts that you want to put into it and the information of your brand identity and put it in there and say, hey, pull from this. Don't make anything else up. That might help, actually.

Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Anyone else want to add in there? John? No. Next question, we can jump to anonymous. How do you balance current versus future tool potential when making buy-in decisions? That's a good question. Do you work closely with the development team for targeted improvements? Any thoughts from the team on that, and merchandising specifically? And yeah.

We do.

Yeah.

We work closely with the teams of the software as we pick for sure. And that's one of the reasons we picked those, you know, those softwares or the interfaces that we use, is, you know, the ability to kind of tailor it in for improvement for what we see.

Awesome. Any other thoughts around that?

Sure. Um, I think the current versus future— I obviously the landscape's going to continue to change rapidly, and so being nimble and making sure that you're constantly balancing that is important.

Being—

making sure your processes enable you to adopt new tools and replace the previous. It's a tool. So as long as your process is good, you can put different tools in place, especially if you're planning that in as you're building those processes. And definitely work closely with your development teams, especially if you're customizing something or building your own models, for example.

Yeah, absolutely. At my agency, I also see it used as a selling tool most frequently, actually, because a lot of people, even if they're professionals in the industry, have a hard time reading CADs, I find. And so it allows people to make decisions of what they like and what they don't like pretty quickly in comparison.

I have a question, comment to the team, maybe that's related to that. Because we can create such great product in rendered or photorealistically at such an early stage, how do you address that with your non-designer reviewers? So as I show it to the senior team, what used to be a sketch and was in a black and white sketch line art mode you know it's loose. You know there's still a lot of work to be done. But if I show an AI drawing alongside that, trying to show it in its environment, the viewers think it's already baked. And I almost kind of need to put at the top, first design review, still 2 more reviews to go, or something. So I kind of have to retrain people with how they look at it. So I was curious if you guys had comments on if you've had to retrain that, or how you address that at some of the larger companies. Companies.

Yeah, that's absolutely an issue, or it was an issue. I think people get it now because they're getting more and more ingrained and used to looking at AI models and knowing that it's an AI version. Um, but yeah, when we first— I, I was thinking about digital product creation. When I first was introducing that at Columbia Sportswear, I would take a, um, digital product, an apparel item, And I would put it in front of a merchandiser or a developer. And they would look at it and be like, I can't see the design lines. I need— like, you need to do that. So we worked with Browser actually at the time to put dark lines, like, be able to toggle those on and off so that you could actually show the design lines. Because they were so used to looking at 2D CAD where they see a line and they're like, oh, that— even though it's not accurate, they get used to looking at it. It's the same thing, I think. It's a cultural shift. They've got to get used looking at it, knowing it's not a final design.

It's certainly been a painful process where I'm sitting and where I'm working. Oh, we're being recorded. They're going to see me and hear me. No, but I think it's all about left brain and right brain. I think the right brainers of the 5th Floor are keen, can totally see a concept 50 feet away with sample goggles on and totally get it. The left brains, forget it. It has to be line drawing. So what we do is you have to know your audience. You have to know your audience. And sometimes you got to do both. You got to do the line drawing. But I've not figured out how to teach people to read a render yet.

I love that. We'll jump into the next question here. Another anonymous question. AI can be seen as a gift now, but are there worries or potential setbacks from looking at it 5, 10, or 20 years out? Specifically thinking of decision-making muscles. Oh yeah, I think a little AI fatigue maybe in the future. I don't know about anybody else.

I'm scared. I don't know about you, but I mean, if you go back to looking at like a lot of talent leaves in industry when you start farming it out to other places to produce it. So we've lost a lot of talent, for instance, in the United States because we don't manufacture as much, right? It's the same thing with AI. You start losing that muscle and that talent and creativity is like what sets us apart. So I think that we have to think about that and we also have to consider all the other ramifications of AI outside of our industry. And so that's what— it's a double-edged sword. Some days I'm like super excited because I'm like, I can do this. And other days I'm like, what am I doing?

You know, so I feel like I've intentionally made the decision not to use AI sometimes because it's like so much. It's like, I know it's going to give me this answer. Let me see what I can do by myself. Like, you know, it can get scary. So you do want to keep using your brain and keep building that muscle for sure. And there's got to be a good balance or at least ask AI like, hey, give me some muscle building. Tools for my brain, like, and I'll follow that.

I still forget to use it, you know, because it's— to me it's still so new. I go to my first, you know, I sketch first, or I read something, or I write the email, and then I'm like, oh yeah, I got a software that does that. It's still, uh, I don't use it probably as much as I should yet.

Definitely. Um, let's jump to the next one here. Uh, are you using open source LLMs keep the IPs within the brand?

Well, that's open source LLMs versus not open source. Like, yeah, I think, um, for— we have custom-built tools that we use that keep it within our, you know, sphere. We also have off-the-shelf tools that we subscribe to and use. I think it depends on what you put in there. Anything that's IP-specific, you have to be very cautious with. Especially, we don't know yet. This is still evolving. And who's going to say who owns what? I guarantee you some of the companies are going to be like, oh, we now own that design, or we own that photography, whatever it might be. So it's something to definitely be aware of and be working with your legal teams. I stay away from it as much as I can as far as, like, making sure that legal's approved, and I'm not making some of those decisions.

For IP, we definitely don't want to put anything in AI, for sure. Yeah, we try to do it old school. Yeah. And yeah, it's kind of a scary thing, for sure. Real quick, as an aside, I'm a musician, and I'm recording a song for an upcoming album. And I get a phone call at 6:00 AM yesterday morning, And my guitarist is all excited. He's like, you got to check, check this file out. So don't know how they do it, but in music right now, AI copied my voice and sang the whole song for me instead of me going to the studio. Now that's pretty crazy. Now what is it going to do in the design world another year from now? I don't know. But it usually starts with video and audio. And I had a wake-up call a couple days ago when I hear my voice singing a song that I never sang. It was like really—

that is crazy.

Like My inflections sounded just like me. So buyer beware.

Wow. Crazy.

Creepy.

Yeah. Awesome.

Yeah. So that was my question exactly. That here is what I'm talking about, that open source versus the product and the licensed LLMs, because those ultimately gets deployed into some kind of a black hole. And then from there, these kind of —by examples can be.

Yeah, and that's interesting because this is all serendipitous that we're even having this conversation. So I then call my producer in LA, and I showed him the song, and he's laughing. And he's like, you know what? He's like, if AI wrote this song, which it didn't— I wrote the song— you cannot copyright it. So there's a big question out there is, if we're using AI to design shoes— I know it's a different industry— I don't know what those rules are, but I did find out yesterday that if I would have wrote that song using AI, forget it. No, I can't copyright it. Then everyone else could copy that. So that's a pretty alarming thing I just learned. So yeah, I don't know how to answer that. I hope it doesn't go in the footwear industry, but I can't see why it wouldn't.

What do you think, Jay? Yeah, I don't know. I'm scared.

Yeah, pretty scary stuff. Well, moving to a little bit of a lighter note and for some of the future people in the industry coming up, I have a question here from Alyssa, which I think is a great one. Do you think it's important for a recent grad student who is seeking internships or jobs to have some knowledge about AI and be able to use it? Who wants to start with that one? Yes.

Yes.

100%, yes. All right, so I think we know the answer to that one. I think it's just definitely going— it's not going anywhere. So the more you can invest yourself in learning that now, the better. Here, we'll jump to the next question. A little bit of a shorter question here from Carissa. How does it line up with fit testing? Does anyone have any knowledge on how to bridge that gap with AI and fit testing?

Fit testing in this world? Sure. There's— I mean, if you have good data with fit testing and you have it structured, it makes it easier. But you should be able to point— say fit testing or even like wear testing feedback. I'm sure you have a ton of surveys. And it might be hard to find the answer you're looking you're looking for. So AI can definitely help quantify that for you.

We still use traditional fit testing methods and also use partners like Helix and MeshOne and such, but, um, what AI is helping us out with is we dump the data and we have it sift through the data and extrapolate it and give us a report. Well, we always double-check it, but it really helps the timelines and creating a narrative around how it's fitting. So it's helping us.

I love that. Awesome. We'll jump to the next question here. It seems AI is helping early process design, review, internal sell-in, and are you applying it to further GTM sales catalogs, et cetera? Is the 2D CAD dead?

I think the 2D CAD has changed. I think it has to change, actually. I don't know how many of you have taken traditional 2D CAD and then run it through AI. In some cases, it nails it. In other cases, the shape of the 2D CAD is so far off, especially— I work across apparel, footwear, and accessories. And so for apparel, it's way more of a mess. The other thing too is AI tends to make up. So if your 2D CAD is just your lateral view and maybe a top view, you may not have enough information for AI to make up the rest of it. So again, it depends if you have internal models that are built and those sometimes are more accurate. But if you're working with off-the-shelf stuff, then it gets more challenging. And we're using it downstream a lot, probably more so than upstream in a lot of cases. Yeah, I love that.

I also work with a lot of entrepreneurs and, you know, for people that have less capital and smaller teams, I find it goes a long way and taking it past the design phase, but also into the sell-in process as well, for sure. Awesome. I think we have time for one more question. I'm loving all the enthusiasm and the questions in the room, so feel free to find the panel afterwards to continue to ask these questions. But the last one that I'll get to here is, do you think the speed of AI assistance for designers contributes to faster burnout?

Nick, are you getting burnt out? One of my designers over there. And he just got off a plane from China. So if he was going to be burnt out, it'd be right now. But no, I haven't seen it. Yeah.

I think that the designers are actually loving it because they're able to bring some of their stuff to life. But yeah, who knows? Over time, I think that might happen.

Yeah. Yes, I think A lot of them are loving it. Some of them are a little scared of that portion. The only burnout would be learning new tools during a season.

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, this was an awesome panel. I hope you guys enjoyed the questions the team got to answer today. We'll be around for more questions, so come and find us. Thank you all for listening.

Thank you, Erin.

Thanks.