Developed by a new retail-focused research team within Alibaba, FashionAI highlights how new technology, and especially AI, stands to reshape major industries.

The system uses a popular and powerful kind of machine learning known as deep learning. Already, FashionAI has learned to recognize hundreds of millions of items of clothing as well as the tastes of designers and fashion aficionados on Alibaba’s shopping sites. The technology is also customized for every store, generating dozens of outfit matches from the hundreds of items in inventory.

A shopper tries Alibaba's FashionAI system. Getty

If the technology becomes more widely used—currently Alibaba has installed it free of charge at 13 stores across China—it could transform commerce by giving consumers an incentive to visit brick-and-mortar stores at a time when offline retail in both China and the U.S. are in decline.

Alibaba is going all in to “digitize the offline retail world,” according to the company’s CEO, Daniel Zhang. During the shopping festival, people who visited a select group of restaurants and stores in China were able to play an AR game akin to Pokémon Go using Alibaba’s apps to earn coupons.

“In the age of mobile Internet, the merging of online and offline [retail] is a trend,” says Jianzhen Peng, secretary general of the China Chain Store and Franchise Association, explaining why e-commerce platforms like Alibaba would want to branch out into offline retail. “Consumers don’t distinguish between online and offline as long as it fulfills their needs.”

Another Chinese e-commerce giant, JD.com, plans to launch a brick-and-mortar grocery store called 7Fresh that offers online-style speedy delivery.

In a report issued by China’s ministry of commerce in September, the government laid out a detailed plan to revamp retail using technologies such as AI and cloud computing. Citing Alibaba’s daily tax contribution of 100 million yuan ($15 million) in 2016, the government seemed hopeful that emerging e-commerce technology would spur economic growth and create new jobs.