"AI supports fashion's climate goals but workers may be left behind"

In the industrial town of Rupganj outside of Bangladesh’s capital, clothing manufacturer Fakir Fashions is using artificial intelligence to automatically pause production and avoid waste when something goes wrong in its knitting operations.

AI technology has also allowed the fashion supplier, which employs about 10,000 workers, to dismiss dozens of human quality inspectors, said managing director Fakir Kamruzzaman Nahid.

Suppliers and brands across the $1.7 trillion global fashion industry are beginning to use AI technology, such as in cameras and sensors that detect defects, to boost production and to reduce their environmental impact, including by monitoring emissions and water use.

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While AI could help improve the apparel business' environmental track record, it also poses a threat to some of the 75 million jobs in the labour-intensive industry worldwide, already under pressure from other forms of automation.

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While Fakir Fashions reduced its quality control workforce after bringing in AI, Nahid said the money it saved on those wages and on the hundreds of kgs of waste the tools prevented will enable it to expand operations – and add new jobs.

"To stay competitive, we need to cut costs and adopt new innovations. But better tools also will bring us business and make up for the job losses,” he Context/the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

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