Managing Partner, Ardinois
Sander Ardinois
Fractional CAIO & executive AI advisor. Former VP of AI at H&M Group and Director of AI at Nike EMEA.
- $100M+
- EBIT portfolio run at Nike EMEA
- ~100
- AI & ML engineers led at H&M Group
- 10 yrs
- leading data & AI in the enterprise
About Sander
Sander Ardinois is a fractional Chief AI Officer (CAIO) and executive AI advisor for fashion, apparel and retail companies, and co-founder and Managing Partner of Ardinois. Sander was previously Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at H&M Group and Director of Artificial Intelligence for Nike in EMEA.
Read moreShow less
At H&M Group in Stockholm, Sander led a global AI and machine learning organisation of around 100 engineers and data scientists, with oversight of a wider 400+ person engineering environment. The team took demand forecasting, inventory optimisation, pricing, markdown, recommendations and generative AI from concept into production, and Sander helped shape the enterprise AI strategy presented to the board as part of the Data & AI leadership team.
At Nike, Sander built the EMEA AI function to 11 cross-functional squads and ran forecasting, close-out optimisation, inventory and personalisation as one connected portfolio worth more than $100M in EBIT, while migrating regional AI products onto Nike's global ML platform.
Before retail, Sander built data platforms and teams as Head of Data at Dynasource and data platform architect at LeasePlan Digital, and started out as a data consultant in financial services at EY. Sander holds an MSc in Aerospace Engineering from Delft University of Technology, with a focus on operations research.
Point of view
- Fund cross-domain capabilities — forecasting, product understanding, agentic infrastructure — instead of isolated use cases that each rebuild the same fundamentals.
- The largest untapped AI value in retail sits in merchandising, buying and S&OP. Employee-productivity tools rarely move the margin.
- Inventory, pricing and personalisation are one commercial decision and should be optimised together.
- Agentic commerce is a consumer-signal source for the whole value chain, not just a new sales channel.
- Time to value is usually held back by ownership, funding and adoption, not by the AI engineering.
How to work with Sander
- Fractional or interim Chief AI Officer (or CDAO), typically one to three days a week, owning AI strategy, portfolio, operating model and team.
- Board and CEO advisory on AI investment, prioritisation and transformation.
- Executive workshops and keynotes on AI in fashion and retail, including agentic commerce.
- Advisory to AI startups working across the apparel value chain.
- Available across Europe and North America.
