Built for fashion: Zalando showcases its vision for agentic shopping at Web Summit 2026

• At Web Summit 2026, Zalando will share how it is embracing agentic commerce across three areas: evolving its own AI Assistant, reaching customers through external AI agents, and extending its shopping experience beyond its own assortment through new partnerships. At the heart of this strategy is Zalando's fashion-specific data and intelligence, built on 18 years of experience in European fashion e-commerce.
• Within its own platform, Zalando is bringing this intelligence to life through its AI Assistant, combining leading large language models with its own AI models and customer data to deliver what the company calls Lifestyle AI. With 22 million customers visiting the Zalando Assistant this year, Zalando is gaining deeper insights into how customers shop with AI and make the experience more personal.
• Size advice is the latest addition to the Assistant, built on more than 10,000 mapped size charts with product information, purchase history and customer fit feedback to help customers find the right size through a conversation.

Lisbon, 11 November 2026 – As AI agents become a new way for people to discover and shop for products, Zalando is investing to turn its AI Assistant into a more personal fashion and lifestyle companion. 22 million people visited the Zalando Assistant this year. In early 2025, just over 2 million had tried it since its launch. As it has grown, it has become more and more specialised in fashion and lifestyle. Zalando’s own AI models run the Assistant’s product search, recommendations, visual discovery and, now, size advice, drawing on 18 years of experience in European fashion e-commerce and extensive fashion-specific data, including insights from 53 million customers. Large language models from OpenAI and other leading AI models power the conversation.

Size advice is the newest addition to Zalando Assistant’s features, helping customers find products that are not only relevant to their preferences but also available in their size,  while allowing customers to ask which size would fit without leaving the conversation. Behind that seemingly simple answer is technology Zalando has been building since 2018. It maps more than 10,000 size charts across hundreds of sizing systems. But size charts alone are not enough to help customers find the right fit. Zalando personalises and simplifies sizing for customers by combining product data with customers’ sizing preferences, such as but not limited to, long-lasting purchase behaviour trends, return history, body measurements, fit feedback and more. Size advice already covers around 70% of Zalando’s assortment. By prioritising products available in customers’ sizes, the Assistant has already increased add-to-cart rates by 4% in A/B testing.

As AI agents increasingly help customers discover and shop for fashion, this depth of specialised data becomes a key differentiator: while general-purpose AI models can recommend products, reliable size advice requires detailed fashion-specific information and an understanding of how products fit real customers.

Beyond size advice, Zalando has been expanding the Assistant's capabilities across the shopping journey, bringing together inspiration, product discovery and shopping in a single conversation. Customers can upload an image to find similar styles, refine recommendations using natural language, and ask the Assistant to consider context such as the weather, upcoming occasions or current fashion trends. They can also compare products side by side, check availability, add items to their bag and proceed to checkout without leaving the conversation. The Assistant also supports customers after purchase, allowing them to track their orders directly in the chat. Today, 92% of customers checking on an order use interactive order cards, up from 65% with text-only replies.

Alongside the new features, Zalando has steadily improved the quality, personalisation and speed of the Assistant’s answers. Queries to the Assistant are three times longer than typical search queries, and customers ask more than two questions per conversation on average. Rather than relying on short keywords, customers can describe what they're looking for in more detail and refine their choices through an ongoing conversation. Customers are responding: they’re engaging with it more, adding more to their bag and coming back more often.

Graeme Smith, SVP, Chief Technology Officer at Zalando, says: “AI is changing the way people discover fashion, and we want Zalando to be where that journey starts. The Zalando Assistant plays an important part in our bigger vision of Lifestyle AI. Think of it as a layer of intelligence that runs through the whole Zalando experience: over time, it gets to know you – your taste, your size, the occasions you’re shopping for and what you need right now. Whether you’re chatting with the Assistant, scrolling your Feed or searching for something specific, every interaction helps us get to know you better than ever before. We use that to create an experience that feels like a true fashion and lifestyle companion – one that knows you and the world of fashion and lifestyle inside out.”

Graeme Smith will expand on this at Web Summit in his talk “-Surviving- Thriving in the Age of Agentic Commerce”. As AI agents start to discover and buy on people’s behalf, he’ll ask what that means for fashion – and whether humans will stay the main shoppers. The talk will take place on November 12, at 10:15 at Stage 4 – Commerce Summit. 

Read the full story and download the visual assets on the Zalando newsroom.