A New Era of Window-Shopping: Glance AI Steps Out
Picture scrolling your phone’s lock screen and, instead of ads or selfies, you see you wearing a jacket straight off a Paris runway—complete with creases that move where your elbow would bend. That’s the promise of Glance AI, the new “AI-native commerce” platform from Google-backed Glance, which went live globally on 22 May 2025 on both Android and iOS.
Glance calls it an “inspiration-led discovery experience,” a fancy way of saying you no longer type what you want; the app shows you things you didn’t know you needed, styled on your own selfie.
Beyond the Search Bar: How the App Works
Traditional e-commerce waits for you to search. Glance flips that script. Fire up the app, snap or upload a photo, and its generative-AI engine does three jobs in a heartbeat:
- Clothes detection—isolates your silhouette.
- Hyper-real rendering—drapes garments across “thousands of parameters” such as body type, skin tone, and lighting.
- Live product match—maps every look to real inventory from more than 400 brands and lets you buy with one tap. (The Indian Express, Business Wire)
The result feels less like browsing and more like swiping through alternate universes of your closet. Users can save looks as wallpapers, share them on socials, or keep swiping until the algorithm figures out today’s vibe.
Under the Hood: The Three-Layer Brain
Glance’s engineers split the system into three AI layers: Commerce Intelligence (predictive trends from decades of retail data), GenAI Experience (those photorealistic try-ons), and a Transaction Journey Agent that nudges you toward checkout before you’ve even whispered “add to cart.” The whole stack plugs into Google’s Gemini and Imagen on Vertex AI, and importantly is opt-in, so shoppers can yank their data at any time.
Trials, Traction, and Early Numbers
Early U.S. trials hint at real momentum: 1.5 million active users in just a few weeks, 40 million style requests, and a conversion funnel where 40 percent of sessions morph into a shopping journey. Half of those users come back weekly, a stickiness metric ordinary fashion apps would kill for.
A Fresh Playbook for Retailers and Brands
For labels, Glance AI is equal parts catwalk and cash register. Brands get front-row placement on lock screens and smart TVs yes, the company is courting Android phone-makers and telecom carriers to ship its software baked in. Fashion houses also receive anonymized trend data, letting them tweak inventory on the fly.
If the future customer browses by swiping their own photo, shelf space as we know it disappears; storytelling and on-body visual search take its place.
The Competitive Arena: Google, DressX & Co.
Glance isn’t alone. Google’s upgraded “Try It On” lets shoppers upload photos directly into Search, and AR-fashion pioneer DressX has been selling digital outfits since 2021. But Glance bets that deep personalization plus one-tap purchase beats isolated try-on widgets.
What’s different: Glance wraps discovery and checkout inside one AI layer, spans phones, TVs and soon in-store mirrors, and positions itself as a platform rather than a plug-in.
What Shoppers Gain—and Must Guard
Shoppers win time and confidence: no more guessing hem lengths or hunting size charts. Yet hyper-personal data is the system’s fuel. Glance stresses privacy controls, but you still hand over face, body metrics, and taste signals. Experts advise treating style selfies like any biometric use strong passcodes, update permissions, and, if you ever uninstall, purge stored avatars.
Where the Story Goes Next
Glance hints at beauty, accessories, and travel categories later this year, plus a rumored $10 billion IPO for parent InMobi riding on the platform’s success. If that listing lands, investors won’t just be buying an app; they’ll be buying a blueprint for AI-generated consumer demand.
The big question: will shoppers embrace inspiration-first commerce at scale, or tune out another feed of algorithmic temptation? The answer may decide the shape of every digital storefront in the next decade.
