Lily AI, a retail technology platform specializing in AI solutions for retailers and types, has appointed its first-ever president to speed up growth of the business.

Ahmed Naiem, formerly chief industrial officer at eShopWorld (ESW) where he worked with Nike, Estée Lauder, Victoria’s Secret and J. Crew, has turn into Lily’s president and chief revenue officer. ESW is a Dublin-based, Asendia-owned company that assists brands and retailers with conducting cross-border e-commerce.

At Lily, Naiem will report on to Purva Gupta, cofounder and chief executive officer. Naiem could have responsibility for the expansion strategy and expanding business across North America and Europe. 

The appointment comes at a time when the conversation around AI has heated up and its applications are more in demand.

“Our growth has accelerated significantly over the past 12 months and Ahmed’s global retail and e-commerce expertise will allow us to expand our reach. Ahmed brings an incredible wealth of high-level relationships across the style, beauty and luxury world,” said Gupta in a press release issued Tuesday.  “His track record of growth will make him a priceless addition to our executive team as we scale our business.”

Naiem is an e-commerce technology and retail industry veteran with greater than 20 years’ experience in strategy, sales, marketing and client operations, having worked closely with large retail brands across six continents. He’s credited with being instrumental in helping ESW grow to greater than $1 billion in revenue. He worked there for about 10 years.

“Purva and your entire team have done an incredible job constructing Lily AI as a pacesetter within the intersection of AI and retail during the last seven years and partnering with among the world’s leading retailers,” Naiem said in a press release. “Lily continues to remodel the way in which consumers discover and interact with their favorite brands by enabling an unparalleled customer-centric e-commerce experience that has resulted in significant growth, operational scale and efficiency for brands and retailers.”

Lily AI is a female-founded AI company helping retailers and types “bridge the gap between ‘merchant-speak’ and ‘customer-speak’,” in accordance with the corporate. “The corporate enhances customer shopping experiences by injecting consumer-centric language throughout the retail technology ecosystem.” The corporate also said that it’s compatible with leading e-commerce platforms to maximise existing tech investments to lift revenues through improved product attribution, enhanced discovery, and better customer conversion.

In a press release provided to WWD, the corporate explained how it really works, indicating, “While many retailers attempt to bridge the language gap by automating just three to 5 product attributes for every item on their website, Lily takes a novel approach and starts with the patron to know how they describe products. It then applies various kinds of artificial intelligence — primarily computer vision, natural language processing, machine learning and enormous language models — to this data to automate the myriad descriptions that customers often use. Lily then matches consumers’ terms to retailers’ descriptions.

Only in the near past, Lily worked with Bloomingdale’s on the shop’s Barbiecore trend shop. As a Lily spokesperson said, “Lily AI helped operationalize it. Lily AI emphasized the visual characteristics, or attributes of Barbiecore in language that resonated with consumers across the Barbiecore aesthetic — shimmering sequins, alluring and female sparkling rhinestones, pink, fuchsia, etc. — that then went back to a particular inventory on Bloomingdale’s website.”