Last week, BoF Insights, The Business of Fashion’s data and advisory team, hosted a breakfast in London to bring together senior executives from across fashion, luxury and retail to discuss a pressing question: How do brands track their performance when AI and algorithms increasingly determine what consumers see, connect with and buy?

The session was led by head of BoF Insights, AI tools and strategy, Amanda Dargan; Hannah Crump, director of BoF Insights; and partnerships lead Tom Lau from Quilt.AI, BoF’s exclusive AI partner. Nick Blunden, BoF’s president, opened the discussion by emphasising the gap between traditional brand measurement tools and the realities of today’s market.

“The tools built to measure brand performance were designed for an analogue world. They don’t capture how brands are perceived and represented across the digital and AI ecosystems that now shape consumer behaviour,” said Blunden.

Platforms like TikTok, Instagram and AI chatbots are changing how brands are discovered and evaluated, making it critical for leaders to consider not just how customers perceive their brands, but how AI does, too. Sixty-four percent of consumers in the US, UK and Canada already use AI tools to research products, according to Salsify, while 40 percent of UK consumers are open to AI making purchases on their behalf, per a survey by digital payments company Checkout.com. This evolution signals that AI has become a critical participant in the shopping journey, requiring brands to rethink their measurement frameworks.

Introducing BoF Insights Brand Pulse

The presenters introduced BoF Insights Brand Pulse, a new AI-driven brand performance tool designed specifically for the fashion industry, created in partnership with Quilt.AI. The tool evaluates fashion brand performance across five dimensions — Discoverability, Identity, Value, Connection and Love — and reads digital signals from social media, search and AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude to provide quantitative scoring alongside qualitative conversation insights.

They also shared insights from the inaugural BoF Insights Brand Pulse Index, which launched last week and uses the tool to evaluate the performance of 100 leading brands between January 1 and August 31, 2025. The insights reveal that building brand equity is multidimensional, requiring brands to sometimes make tradeoffs to manage natural tensions. For example, the analysis showed that when the visibility of high-street brands increases — such as through rapid expansion or increased promotional activity — customers’ perception of value can decrease.

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) also emerged as a key topic, with the audience raising questions around how to ensure their brands show up when customers use AI chatbots to discover and shop fashion.