In today’s market, retailers are facing unprecedented levels of competition, escalating customer demands, and mounting macroeconomic pressure.

“It’s a real tough game,” explains Philip Glebow, chief enterprise architect and VP Data, AI, and MarTech at Catalyst Brands. “There’s a lot of competition to turn products around more rapidly and produce stunning visuals. There’s always pressure to do things more quickly because the sooner you get a product to market, the sooner you’re able to see whether customers like it or not.”

One of the most critical challenges for apparel retailers is responding to rapidly evolving trends fast enough. Fashion now moves at the speed of a scroll, leaving many brands scrambling to launch products before the latest style peaks and fades. This need for speed and quality places a heavy burden on traditional design and creative processes, which are often slow and expensive due to multiple iterations and creative shoots.

Previously, every requested change—a new angle, a color variation, a different setting, or altering the number of models—would have required another creative design cycle. Now, a team can use Gemini Enterprise to iterate at market speed, placing a product on a sunny beach or instantly modifying the composition of an image without organizing additional shoots. They can even turn static images and sketches into videos, completely transforming Catalyst Brands’ creative workflows.

“The Veo models have just been transformational. We were able to take a still image and turn that into a video,” Glebow says. “We can add audio, change angles, venues. It’s a really powerful way to visualize and understand where this product fits in our assortment.”

Looking ahead, Glebow believes the biggest future implication of Gemini Enterprise will be its potential to introduce new ways of working and make advanced AI tools accessible to everyone in the organization.

“Being able to turn around prototypes, produce production code more rapidly is really a game changer,” Glebow says. “I’m terrible at building UIs, and I was able to build a UI to demonstrate Google’s virtual try-on very easily. That’s going to help people, whatever function they work in, do something more than they think they can do with the help of these tools.”

Ultimately, Gemini Enterprise is providing the AI foundation needed to pursue more targeted, high-value use cases. For instance, a key step in Catalyst Brands’ AI roadmap is moving away from reactive to a more explanatory model to better understand business performance and improve decision-making, while reducing the burden of routine tasks like Monday reporting.

The key to maintaining this momentum, according to Glebow, is recognizing AI tools are more about augmentation than replacement. On a cultural level, he stresses the importance of addressing concerns head-on, providing training and offering frequent opportunities to showcase results.

“AI is a very new area, and I think that's really important to understand the problems that they're trying to solve and apply AI in a way that works,” he says. “As you embark on an AI transformation, you really need to keep people at the center and you need to understand their motivations, their fears, and really meet them where they are.”