Why ROI-focused founder Amelia Tombs put the brakes on AI
At a moment when being "AI native" is treated as a default condition for startups, the two co-founders of sustainable bra brand under+beneath instead chose to pause. Amelia Tombs, who oversees operations, ROI, efficiency, and structure, and co-founder Chloe Grant discussed early on in the company's life how far to bring generative AI in, and how. The result came from weighing efficiency gains against environmental and ethical costs together, and deciding which tasks to hand to AI and which to keep human-centered.
Behind this conversation lies broader tension across the industry. As fashion, long dependent on fast-fashion-style overproduction and overconsumption, moves quickly toward agentic decision-making, where AI judges for itself and carries out tasks, the question of the planetary, human, and ethical cost of a single prompt is easy to push aside. Industry surveys have confirmed both the pressure to adopt AI and the hesitation that this question raises, occurring at the same time.
The report containing this discussion includes profiles and interviews with 17 AI companies, perspectives from 12 industry figures, and results from a survey of roughly 100 respondents. The under+beneath case is one example among them, showing that the question being revisited, regardless of brand size, is less whether to adopt AI than which tasks to hand over to it.
