At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Gap Inc. outlined a new strategy to retool how it reaches shoppers across its portfolio, announcing an AI-led marketing transformation aimed at making its shared marketing organization faster, more connected and more effective. The company said the effort is intended to convert its centralized marketing capability into a scalable growth engine that can react in near real time using data, AI and agentic systems to improve relevance, deepen loyalty and break down long-standing functional silos.
The initiative focuses on building a marketing model that learns continuously from customer behavior and performance signals, helping teams move from periodic campaign planning to more adaptive execution. Gap Inc. said the program will strengthen owned channels first, while also improving how content, commerce and activation work together across brands.
A core building block is data. Gap Inc. is expanding its work with Google Cloud to create a unified, AI-ready foundation that consolidates customer intelligence with product information. The retailer said this shared layer will enable quicker personalisation, sharper decision-making and a feedback-driven system that improves over time across creative, marketing activations and e-commerce experiences.
“Gap Inc. has always been a company that shapes culture, and now we have an opportunity to reshape how we show up for customers in a faster, smarter and more personal way,” said Damon Berger, Senior Vice President, Marketing Shared Services, Gap Inc. “This transformation is about bringing together the creativity of our teams with the power of AI removing silos, unlocking better data, and building a marketing model that learns, adapts and improves with every customer interaction. We are using AI to give our teams more time for strategy, storytelling and the work that creates lasting brand love.”
To help design the operating model behind the shift, Gap Inc. has engaged Publicis Sapient. The company said the work will span talent, process, technology, data and partner ecosystems, with the goal of building a consumer-centric system that is more measurable and more responsive to changing behavior. The intent is to connect content and activation decisions directly to commerce outcomes and customer signals, improving speed and effectiveness while supporting long-term growth.
Gap Inc. also plans to lean on Google Cloud’s AI tooling to build automated workflows and content at scale. The company cited agent-building capabilities such as Agent Studio and Agent Engine, along with Gemini models, as part of the toolkit. It also pointed to Google’s image and video generation models including Nano Banana and Veo as resources to help produce creative assets more efficiently.
The rollout will begin with Gap Inc.’s owned marketing channels, where the company is bringing in Zeta Global to architect an AI-enabled marketing stack. At the center of that stack will be Athena by Zeta, described as an intelligence layer that links customer data, decisioning and execution across the marketing ecosystem. Gap Inc. said Athena’s agentic functions are intended to unify decision-making across audience strategy, creative development, campaign activation and optimisation so the organization can deliver more coordinated campaigns and more personalised experiences at scale.
Gap Inc. CTO Sven Gerjets said the strategy is designed to keep people at the center while using AI to improve organisational responsiveness. “We’re building the future of Gap Inc. with an AI strategy that is human-centered and digitally enabled. This transformation brings together data, AI, and agentic capabilities to help us better understand customer intent, move faster as an organization, and create more meaningful experiences across our portfolio of iconic brands.”
The company positioned the move as part of its broader ambition to operate as a high-performing house of iconic American brands. By combining creative heritage with modern data infrastructure and an AI-led marketing transformation, Gap Inc. said it is building a new marketing model focused on speed, relevance and sustained customer growth.
