On 2 October 2026, the event Fashion AI Expo opened with a voice from fashion's operations rather than its studios. Luca Tonello, CEO of Deda Stealth, gave the day's first talk at Artistic Palace. His message to a room focused on creative AI was clear: the economics of a collection are decided backstage, long before a garment reaches the store window.
Luca Tonello opened with a diagnosis of apparel, footwear and leather goods. Margins are tightening while speed to market keeps accelerating. The two-season calendar has given way to capsules, collaborations and continuous drops; he cited Moncler, a Deda Stealth client, and its Genius project as an example of a collection that never stops.
Customers now expect personalization at scale, and demand is harder to forecast than ever. Meanwhile, wholesale, retail and e-commerce often still run as separate businesses. Omnichannel, he observed, has been talked about far more than delivered. All these pressures converge on one place: the planning office, where brands decide what to make and where to send it.
Tonello acknowledged the startups building creative AI, from generated campaigns to virtual models. Then he drew a line. Deda Stealth works on production, planning, and execution, a side of AI he described, with a smile, as "quite boring". Boring, but decisive. Operational excellence, he argued, is one of fashion's largest untapped opportunities, because that is where a collection's margins are set. He also pointed to a generational shift: young professionals who learned with an AI tutor will expect the same support at work, in the daily choices that put the right product in the right place at the right time.
One platform for the decisions that matter. The real obstacle is fragmentation. Planning, merchandising and finance often work in separate departments, on separate systems, without a shared view of the business. Deda Stealth's answer is to connect three moments on a single platform:
- Plan demand and budget
- Launch production
- Execute, allocating goods according to orders.
Everything rests on one shared inventory, so stock is placed by design rather than by chance. Without that view, he warned, online orders can be served first while stores are left empty. For any complex brand, with many markets, lines and channels, the central question becomes: what should we make, buy, allocate and replenish to achieve the strongest economic result? Answering it takes a new kind of software. Traditional ERPs are monolithic and complex; the new generation must be composable, solving one problem at a time, and AI-first, built on consistent data. "We don't want to put AI into existing systems," Tonello said. "We built a new platform based on AI."
That platform is Stealth Cosmica.
The recent mantra is that a product's life continues after its first transaction. Two of Deda Stealth's newer capabilities follow it into the market. Pricing intelligence monitors how a brand's products are priced online by distributors, partners, and competitors. With several major houses now cutting prices, knowing where a product stands in its category has become essential. Resale intelligence follows the secondhand market. Luca Tonello expects brands to take control of resale themselves: Patagonia led the way, and around 50 brands already run it in-house, while many French and Italian houses still leave it to third parties. His reasons are commercial as well as environmental. Gen Z often buys secondhand first, so resale is where brands meet their next customers. It also offers end-of-season stock a controlled outlet, and upcoming extended producer responsibility (EPR) rules will make the channel grow.
The most visible AI in fashion lives on screens and runways. The most consequential may live in allocation rules, replenishment plans, and resale flows, where every collection is decided a second time. For brands, the question is no longer whether to adopt AI, but where to start. Deda Stealth's answer: with the data, the people, and the decisions in between.
