Sven Gerjets Is one of TIME's 2026 Executives of the Year: Tech and Data - Time Magazine

In 2025, Gap Inc. announced a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud to apply Gemini, Vertex AI, and BigQuery across product creation, planning, pricing, marketing, customer experience, and employee workflows. This year, the company launched more AI-powered customer-facing capabilities like predictive fit guidance and conversational checkout; shopping assistants for Banana Republic and Old Navy are next on the list. 

Leading the company’s investment in AI is CTO Sven Gerjets, who describes its three-pronged approach to the technology as “enable, optimize and reinvent.” That last component, reinvent, includes a complete rework of how Gap Inc. brings products to market, from ideation to design, manufacturing, and marketing. “Process reengineering is core to AI benefit and value,” Gerjets says. “If we don't do the hard work of really understanding how work happens today, breaking down the tasks, redefining who should do what task, and then AI enabling it, the value doesn't come through.”