Executives of the Year: Sven Gerjets

Gap Inc. CTO Sven Gerjets is leading the retailer's multi-year partnership with Google Cloud, announced in 2025, to apply Gemini, Vertex AI, and BigQuery across product creation, planning, pricing, marketing, customer experience, and employee workflows. Gap Inc. has since launched AI-powered customer-facing capabilities including predictive fit guidance and conversational checkout, with shopping assistants for Banana Republic and Old Navy planned next. Gerjets describes the strategy as "enable, optimize and reinvent," with the reinvent phase reworking how Gap Inc. brings products to market from ideation through design, manufacturing, and marketing.

In 2025, Gap Inc. announced a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud https://investors.gapinc.com/press-releases/news-details/2025/Gap-Inc--Sets-Out-to-Reimagine-Retail-Powered-by-Google-Clouds-AI/default.aspx 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 https://www.gapinc.com/en-gb/articles/2026/03/gap-inc-elevates-online-shopping-with-ai-powered-f ; 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.”