#240: How David’s Bridal Is Rebuilding a 76-Year-Old Business Around AI

David's Bridal was built around one thing for 75 years: the dress. In this AI Transformations episode, Elina Vilk (President & Chief Business Officer) and Mike Ball (Head of Product) join Mike Kaput to explain how the company is reinventing itself around the whole wedding journey, the "aisle to algorithm" strategy. We get into Pearl Planner, the free AI wedding-planning companion now used by hundreds of thousands of couples with no marketing spend; Pearl Connect, the new vendor-side platform built on Google Cloud; the vision quiz and dynamic budgeting that make it work; and how David's own teams are adopting AI internally. Presented by Gemini Enterprise. Part of the AI Transformations series, presented by Google Cloud. Show Notes: Access the show notes and show links here Timestamps: 00:00:00 — Intro 00:05:01 — How the AI transformation at David's Bridal began 00:06:36 — The early phases and turning points 00:10:53 — Inside Pearl Planner, the customer-facing assistant 00:13:59 — Using AI for timelines, budget, and vendors 00:19:24 — The models, tools, and platforms behind it 00:21:00 — Pearl Connect and the Google Cloud stack 00:25:46 — Early results from Pearl Planner and Pearl Connect 00:27:32 — How internal teams at David's Bridal use AI 00:33:29 — What's next for David's Bridal This episode is presented by Google Cloud: Google Cloud is the new way to the cloud, providing AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools built for today and tomorrow. Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully integrated and optimized AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom-built chips, generative AI models and development platform, as well as AI-powered applications, to help organizations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner. Learn more about Google Cloud here: https://cloud.google.com/ Visit our website Receive our weekly newsletter Join our community: Slack Community LinkedIn Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Looking for content and resources? Register for a free webinar Come to our next Marketing AI Conference Enroll in our AI Academy