Jos. A. Bank, the menswear chain owned by Tailored Brands, unveiled a new store concept in Peachtree City, Georgia, in October 2026. The 4,960 square foot store has a dedicated experience centre for consultations, fittings and personalised service. Tailored Brands says customer research, customer data, performance data from existing stores and machine learning models guided the layout, the merchandising, the services and how shoppers move through the space.

The claim, and what actually changed

The story is pitched as a retailer putting customer experience at the centre. Karla Gray, chief operating officer of Tailored Brands, said they took what customers have always valued about the brand: quality, craftsmanship and personal service.

So what changed? Not the service itself. A menswear store has always measured a customer’s shoulders and talked them through a fabric. What changed is where the floor space and the staff hours go. The store is built around the conversation that happens before a suit is bought, and the data told them that is the part worth paying for.

That is worth noticing, because most retailers do the opposite without meaning to. Their best people spend the day answering questions that have one correct answer. Where is my order. Do you have this in a 42 regular. Can I return this. None of that needs a person, and every hour spent on it is an hour not spent with a customer who is about to spend four figures.

Put people where a conversation changes the sale

My view is that customer service teams in their current form will not survive. A competent AI customer service setup can already handle most enquiries, in my estimate 80 to 90% of them. That includes the multi-step work: check the order, change the delivery, refund within the limit, book the appointment. The transactional and operational layer no longer needs people.

People become the premium layer. Human-to-human service is what sets a business apart in the moments that matter, and big-ticket purchases are the clearest case. A fitting is one. So is a consultation for a renovation, a hearing aid, an engagement ring or a car.

Jos. A. Bank has made that split in physical form. The experience centre is the human layer. Everything around it is the business running as efficiently as it can.

What this looks like for a smaller operator

Take a tailor or a furniture showroom with two or three staff. Most of their day looks like this: WhatsApp messages asking whether the shop opens on Sunday, whether the sofa comes in grey, when the order will arrive, how to move a pickup time. Those questions arrive in the channel the customer already uses, and the customer expects them handled there, not pushed to a form.

Hand that traffic to AI, with the limits set by the owner. It answers, checks the order, changes the booking, and passes anything over the limit to a person with the order details attached. This is the layer AeroChat is built for. You describe the workflow in your own words, and it runs that workflow and acts in your systems rather than only replying.

Now the two or three staff spend their hours on the people who walked in, booked a consultation, or asked which of two options is right for them. That is where a human conversation decides whether the sale happens and how big it is.

The reverse position, “we only use humans”, does not work. It does not scale economically, and a competitor who has made the split will outgrow you. Piling on more people to keep up with machine speed is not a strategy either.

The data decides where the people go

The detail I like most in this story is that the layout came from data. Tailored Brands looked at what customers did and valued, then designed around it.

A business with AI handling its transactional conversations gets the same material for free. Every conversation is on record. You can see which questions are routine, where customers hesitate, and which enquiries turned into a sale once a person stepped in. That is the supervision and strategy work the service team moves into: reading those conversations and deciding where a human-to-human experience earns its cost.

What to do

List every type of enquiry your business gets. Mark the ones with one correct answer: order status, stock, opening hours, returns, rescheduling. Give those to AI, with your limits on refunds, discounts and promises set in the system rather than left to the conversation. Then look at what is left. Those are the conversations where a person changes the outcome. Put your people there, on purpose, and measure what they close.

Source: CX Dive: Jos. A. Bank puts customer experience at the center of new store concept