How AI Is Changing the Way Business Leaders Make Decisions
BoF sits down with Bianca Anghelina, founder and CEO of decision intelligence platform Aily Labs, to explore her vision for AI-powered leadership, why better decisions are the key to business growth and what it takes to turn AI ambition into measurable impact.
Business leaders in fashion and beauty face mounting challenges in planning due to factors such as tariffs, a sluggish luxury market, and fluctuating demand. Despite having more data than ever, forecasting remains a complex task, as crucial information is scattered across separate systems and teams. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to streamline operations, but skepticism still prevails in the industry.
According to a 2026 report by The Business of Fashion and McKinsey & Company, automation and generative AI could boost productivity gains by over 30 percent in the next five years; however, the results have not yet been significant. A recent Bain & Company survey of 951 companies worldwide revealed that only about 40 percent of those measuring AI's financial impact had cut costs by less than 10 percent.
The primary obstacle to AI progress, as identified by the survey, is data access and integration, highlighting the need to overcome internal silos. Aily Labs, a data-driven decision intelligence platform built by founder and CEO Bianca Anghelina, aims to bridge this gap. Anghelina, who spent a decade managing global P&Ls in pharmaceuticals, including her role as head of global digital finance at Novartis, observed that critical decisions would stall because different teams worked independently.
In 2020, she left her corporate career to establish Aily Labs, which creates a unified interface that coordinates thousands of specialized AI agents across finance, supply chain, and commercial operations. The platform provides revenue forecasting accuracy of up to 99 percent, outperforming in-house forecasts by an average of 10 percentage points.
Aily Labs has already helped a Fortune 500 company unlock around $685 million in inventory value and operates in the pharma, retail, luxury, and beauty sectors, with offices in New York, Barcelona, Madrid, and Munich. With $101 million in funding, including a $80 million Series B in November 2025 led by FPV Ventures, Aily Labs is well-positioned to drive data-driven decision-making in the fashion and beauty industry.
Written by urgent.news from Business of Fashion's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
