After two days walking the crowded aisles of eShow at Ifema, speaking with exhibitors, listening to speakers and reading flyers, one thing became clear: in 2026, using artificial intelligence (AI) no longer sets a company apart. The good news is that knowing what to use it for, where it adds value and where its usefulness ends can make it a valuable tool for your business and teams.
eShow was one of the seven events that Tech Show Madrid brought together on November 4 and 5 at the exhibition centre. The organisers expected around 30,000 trade visitors and over 500 companies, despite coinciding with the Barcelona Deep Tech Summit. More than 150 gathered in the e-commerce and digital marketing area.
During the presentations, several fashion brands participated to explain how they apply AI in their offices and behind the scenes of their e-commerce operations.
From Coosy to Zalando, including Lady Pipa and Loewe, all the fashion companies that attended eShow already use AI, each on its own scale and with different objectives. None presented a replicable formula, as there is none. What they did share was a specific order of priority.
First come the brand, the product and the customer; then comes the technology that serves them.
Before adding more tools, some brands propose returning to the essentials. Carlota Posada Belbel, e-commerce manager at Spanish womenswear label Nicoli, opened her presentation by proposing “a digital reset to put the product back at the centre”. Her approach involves simplifying the user experience on the website and making it consistent with the brick and mortar store in aspects such as real-time stock and returns.
Coosy shares this approach and sums it up in one sentence. “Technology has been democratised. The brand has not”. Virginia Pozo Castro, founder and CEO of this Spanish womenswear brand, and Betty Lepina, its senior e-commerce and omnichannel expert, opened their talk with this idea. Coosy was founded in 2011 as a multi-brand online store and soon became a brand in its own right.
By 2015, it already had 11 high street stores. Today it has 25 and is present in over 200 multi-brand points-of-sale across more than 30 countries. It launches around 400 styles per season with a team that its managers describe as “tiny”.
For Coosy, AI is “just” the latest in a series of technologies that have transformed the sector and allow brands to maximise the online channel. Having a website or an e-commerce platform no longer differentiates a brand, although failing to execute them properly can penalise it. A slow website or a poor mobile experience is now a handicap, not an option.
The difference lies in knowing how to use technology with good judgement and building a recognisable brand identity. With the conversation increasingly taking place outside a brand's own website, brand imagery, product and the in-store experience are gaining weight.
Shopping habits are changing with the integration of large language models (LLMs) — such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini — into consumers' search and decision-making processes, as shoppers increasingly buy by asking questions. Instead of merely searching for products, they formulate specific, contextualised requests, such as “I want a dress for my friend's afternoon wedding in Madrid in October”.
Coosy wants to be among the brands that appear in that answer. To achieve this, they explained, it is up to them to offer sufficient and relevant information on their website and across their other channels so that AI can identify and recommend the brand. Their advice for getting started is simple: ask the AI itself about the brand. Does it mention it? How does it describe it? What does it highlight?
The answers help detect what information is missing from owned channels and which aspects should be reinforced.
Positioning brands within AI is undoubtedly one of the sector's main concerns. Quique Díaz Paradelo, CEO of Provoca and an expert in communication, marketing and public relations, addressed this as marketing director of Grupo Mascaró, owner of Pretty Ballerinas.
His starting point is that while chatbots already help with searches, we are approaching a scenario where AI agents begin to decide and pay for purchases on behalf of the user. While the challenge until now was to convince the consumer, brands must now also convince the AI.
The first step is technical. The website must be open to AI crawlers, which many brands unknowingly block via the robots.txt
