Direct-to-consumer lingerie brand Thirdlove is preparing its organization for the artificial intelligence revolution, Chief Marketing Officer Amy Carr said at National Retail Federation conference NRF ’26 in January in New York City.

The bra manufacturer is restructuring how its teams works and is adding in new marketing practices to accommodate more shoppers searching on generative AI platforms, Carr said.

“Search is really my biggest headache right now and the change of what’s happening,” Carr said. “That’s where I focus a lot of energy.”

ThirdLove Works to Feed AI Agents With Earned Media, Influencers and Reviews

Consumers are searching for information on the internet in new ways, and Google is not always the de facto source. Shoppers are turning to social media, generative artificial intelligence platforms and general scrolling to find information, which means retailers need to change their SEO marketing practices to reach consumers where they are.

Thirdlove is trying to figure out how to feed those large language models with its content. What marketers are finding is that AI platforms are relying on media sources to populate their content. As a result, Thirdlove is looking to publications like Good Housekeeping and The Wirecutter to feature its products, Carr said. The retailer also is ensuring that reviews on its site are easy for LLMs to find, as those are also good sources that AI agents pull from, she said.

“For AI, we’re going to start heavy in the PR side first to get authority, to get validation,” Carr said. “Influencers play a big role here too. We’re all of a sudden also seeing them pop up as impacting the LLMs too.”

Last year Thirdlove launched a large ambassador program to bolster its influencer program and have more consumers talking about its brand.

“The next generation cares a lot about what other people think and influencers are the easiest way to do that,” she said. “It’s less about what the brand is saying and more about, ‘Did somebody else validate this?’”

More AI Agents at Thirdlove

To prepare its own organization for the AI revolution, Thirdlove has given all of its employees licenses to generative AI chat platform Claude, which was developed by AI platform Anthropic. Thirdlove has between 51-200 employees, according to its LinkedIn page. This allows the brand’s team members to do their own analysis and not have to wait for the data team to pull a report. It’s much faster, Carr said.

“We’re investing a lot of the tools on the backend to help streamline analytics that [make it] easy to surface the right data at the right time to the different business leaders,” she said.

From a staffing perspective, Thirdlove looks to hire smart people with an open mind to handle AI initiatives.

“You’re not going to hire an expert in AI. That doesn’t even exist,” she said. Carr is confident if she gives her employees the tools they will be able to figure it out.

On the flip side, however, entry level jobs everywhere are going to be hard to come by because AI is going to be able to do those jobs faster and cheaper, she said.

“The new copy person is not going to be a copywriter. They’re going to be a copy tool manager,” Carr said. “So their job isn’t going away. It’s just morphing into something else.”

Customer-facing AI Agents

In addition, the retailer is developing an AI agent on the front-end of its website to help with the shopper experience. Thirdlove has an AI agent to help with customer service requests but it does not do enough shopping help, she said.

“If we can recommend the right products and it really is true, then she’ll trust us,” Carr said. “Figuring out how to funnel that through is going to be important.”

Right now, Thirdlove uses a shopper quiz to gather consumer data and preferences. In the future, the quiz will likely go away and data gathering will be more “fluid” and conversational with an agent, Carr said.

She predicts many retail websites will change from the “linear” style today of searching, deciding and purchasing, to more “circular,” in which a shopper visits a site and interacts with an agent about needs. The bot will suggest multiple products throughout the conversation.

To prepare for this future, Thirdlove has already started making changes. ThirdLove is using Snowflake to have its data structured so generative AI agents can easily grab it when called upon. The brand is testing using agents to help consumers when they are shopping. Carr gives them about a 70% pass rate.

AI Agents Will Do the Buying

It’s important to have customer data handy, such as previous size information and order tracking, so shoppers or AI agents don’t have to go digging for it on the site, Carr said.

“Customers are going to continue to be impatient,” she said. It’s about “being able to serve that information quickly and accurately, because as soon as you do something wrong, you lost her because she’s not going to have any patience to let you get it wrong.”

In the future, that AI agent will then make the purchase on the customer’s behalf because her credit card information is saved. And even further in the future that AI agent will be chatting with another AI agent on a different platform making that sale.

“We’re not set up as an ecommerce organization to take those bots and actually process them as real transactions. That’s happening now,” Carr said. “It’s a different world. We’re going to have to be able to catch that.”

Thirdlove Opens Stores

Thirdlove also is betting on physical retail. While the brand was once online-only, in the past few years it has opened six stores, plus it sells product at a few Belk and Neiman Marcus stores. Carr is betting on more consumers going back to the store as a pastime, where shoppers go to try on the clothes.

The AI changes are coming fast, but Carr is happy to be a “fast follower” and not a “first mover.”

“The implications to stay on top of it feel really daunting,” Carr said about AI. “People are confused and paralyzed in some cases by how fast it’s moving.”

Feature Image Photo Credit: National Retail Federation