— Expedia Group appointed Xavier Amatriain as its first chief artificial intelligence officer and data officer. He joins the Seattle-based travel giant from Google where he served as vice president of product in AI and Compute Enablement. Other past employers include Quora, LinkedIn and Netflix.

“[Amatriain’s] deep expertise in building large-scale AI platforms will help redefine how people experience travel,” Expedia CTO Ramana Thumu said in a statement. “Expedia Group operates at a scale few can match, and we invest deeply in our talent, giving technologists the space to learn, experiment, and push the boundaries of what AI can do.”

Amatriain, based in San Jose, Calif., has mapped a diverse career path — he’s been a university professor in Spain, a healthcare startup co-founder, a researcher, and an engineering leader.

— Textio co-founder and former CEO Kieran Snyder returned to Microsoft as vice president of AI transformation.

“My goal in this new role is to help Microsoft be the best living case study of effective, human AI transformation in the world,” Snyder said on LinkedIn.

Snyder began her tech career at Microsoft in 2004, working on the Bing search engine and Windows. In 2014, she launched Textio, which claims to be the first-to-market venture using AI for HR functions. The company’s software helps organizations recruit, hire and retain inclusive teams.

Over the past two years, Snyder ran a business called “nerd processor,” which offered research and leadership coaching, and served as chief scientist emeritus at Textio, where she is now on the board of directors.

— Ross Tennenbaum is leaving his role as president of Avalara for a new role with an unnamed public company, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal. Tennenbaum joined the tax software giant in 2019 and was previously CFO. He worked at Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse before joining Avalara, which relocated its headquarters from Seattle to North Carolina following its acquisition by Vista Equity Partners in 2022. It filed to go public, again, earlier this year.

— After more than 12 years at T-Mobile, Janice Kapner is leaving the telecommunications giant. Kapner was chief communications and corporate responsibility officer and executive VP at the Bellevue, Wash., company where she led a team of more than 160 employees.

“From Magenta sneakers and confetti cannons to competitive stunts, big bets, and a front-line team that made the brand burst off the page and into the world — these are moments I’ll never forget,” Kapner said on LinkedIn. “They shaped me as much as I helped shape them.”

Prior to T-Mobile, Kapner was at Microsoft for more than a decade.

— Former Microsoft and Amazon leader Vinita Ananth is now senior director of product for the cloud company Nebius. Ananth, based in the Seattle area, has been working since July on stealth-mode startups HelpViber and FulcrumAX. Ananth called the decision to leave these ventures “difficult and emotional.”

“I’m thrilled that my co-founder will continue driving both HelpViber and FulcrumAX forward, with a strategic focus on customer traction, platform maturity, and meaningful funding milestones over the coming year,” she said on LinkedIn, adding that she’ll continue in advisor and co-founder roles.

— PayPal appointed Bo English-Wiczling as VP of global developer relations. English-Wiczling, based in Seattle, joins from Oracle, where she worked for nearly nine years in leadership roles in database product management and developer relations. Previous employers include Amazon and Best Buy.

“After an incredible journey working alongside talented engineers, community leaders, and innovation-minded partners, this new role feels like the perfect next step,” English-Wiczling said on LinkedIn. “I’ll be working at the intersection of PayPal’s global payments platform and developer ecosystems — helping build, grow, and energize the communities and relationships that power our future.”

— Jaimin Gandhi joined Seattle-based AI roleplay startup Yoodli as a product leader. Gandhi’s past roles include leadership positions at Nerdy, Binance, Uber, DocuSign, Microsoft and others.

Over the past year, Gandhi built FourPoint.AI, a tool that helps job seekers improve their communications. While he won’t be adding new features to FourPoint, “I am opening it up for free,” Gandhi said on LinkedIn. “If it helps someone land their next opportunity the way it helped me find mine, that is a meaningful way to pay it forward.”

— Kapil Hetamsaria is now chief business officer of Neo4j, a data analysis, graph intelligence platform. Hetamsaria joins from C3 AI, where he served as a vice president, and was previously co-founder and CEO of Viddl App, a Bellevue-based short-video platform.

— Dave Rosenbaum is leaving his role as senior publications manager at Seattle-based pet sitting company Rover to join Airbnb.

“I have always been a firm believer in the transformative power of travel — discovering new places, trying new foods, and having new experiences,” Rosenbaum wrote on LinkedIn. “Airbnb’s mission is central to this belief that the world offers limitless possibilities.”

Rosenbaum is also a deputy mayor and city council member for Mercer Island, a city east of Seattle, and previously served in legislative roles for members of Congress.

— Ambika Singh, founder and CEO of online clothing rental company Armoire, joined the board of trustees for the Seattle Metro Chamber.

— Pete Fewing, associate athletic director at Seattle University and longtime Sounders FC broadcaster, joined the board of directors for Starfire Sports. The organization provides coding classes, drone summer camps, and other free, after-school sports programming for underprivileged kids in South Seattle.

When Ambika Singh, the CEO and founder of the online clothing rental company Armoire, began exploring AI applications, she had to thread the needle between embracing cutting-edge tech and deploying it mindfully.

The Seattle startup has always been “a very human-powered business,” Singh said, with a strong sustainability mission to curb clothing waste through rentals. Consequently, employees were anxious about turning tasks over to bots and troubled by the environmental impacts of data centers and AI computing — despite its potential to remove tedium and boost the company’s finances.

In Armoire’s first big AI splash, the company recently launched a virtual stylist to support customers in their search for the perfect tops, pants, jackets and dresses.

The AI initiative is just the latest challenge Singh has navigated since founding Armoire nearly a decade ago. The company survived the pandemic, pivoting from professional attire to leisure wear during lockdowns, before returning to its roots as in-office mandates took effect. She has responded to an evolving customer base, louder calls for resort and après ski outfits, and demand for an in-person storefront for trying on clothes.

Now, the business is weathering the current economic uncertainties driven by layoffs, fluctuating tariffs and rising prices. But while these conditions could raise expenses for Armoire, they are expected to bolster its customer base as clothing rentals become a cost-saving strategy to maintain professional and personal wardrobes.

“Renting your closet is another way to maintain the lifestyle that you want under different budgetary constraints,” Singh said.

‘No chatbot energy here’

The new Armoire AI app helps customers quickly find curated recommendations in a sea of apparel. The assistant asserts itself quietly with a prompt woven into the display of blouses and pants, asking what it can help find. Once a user clicks on it, the tech suggests items to search for and also allows for user-generated questions.

The app takes a few seconds to cross-reference the customer’s preferences — based on past rentals and items she’s liked or voted down — with clothes currently in stock and ready to ship. The AI provides chipper dialogue and refines selections based on feedback.

In pitching the tech, the company said the AI “talks to you just like a real stylist would (no chatbot energy here) and helps you discover the best pieces for your style in seconds — no scrolling required.”

Shopping assistants fueled by generative AI are proving an increasingly popular trend for online retailers, including Amazon’s recent introduction of Rufus to dig up product recommendations. The chatty tech is also showing up on sites like Redfin and Zillow to aid in home searches.

Armoire is developing additional AI technologies, such as a tool to help standardize clothing descriptions across different brands. It might sound trivial, but companies can have significantly different definitions for sleeve length, for example, whether short, long, capped or three-quarter.

The startup has worked to distinguish itself from larger competitors by offering consultations with stylists via phone and email, and Singh said this human touch will remain a core feature. And the AI, of course, isn’t perfect. In our own test, the assistant landed on a solid blazer suggestion but went on to pair it with an absurdly frilly blouse that a human stylist would not have picked.

And some components of the business simply can’t be automated. Armoire has a brick-and-mortar space south of Seattle’s downtown for trying on clothes. It regularly hosts in-person events for networking and fashion shows, including a collection of up-cycled athletic wear from former pro-soccer player Lu Barnes and an annual South Asian fashion event.

Trending upward

Armoire’s multi-faceted approach to clothing rentals and connecting to customers has found success, albeit with some snags along the way.

The startup has raised $12 million from investors, including a $3.5 million round in 2021 that included backing from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani and others. Armoire reached break-even this quarter, a first for the business.

While the pandemic shrank Armoire’s payroll from more than 60 workers down to 25, it has since rebounded to 100 employees. Last April, the company won Workplace of the Year at the annual GeekWire Awards.

The online clothing rental market is worth an estimated $2.6 billion worldwide, according to October data from Future Market Insights Inc., and it’s expected to grow to $6.4 billion over the decade, with China, India and the U.S. leading the expansion. The sector could benefit as cash-strapped customers look to rentals and secondhand.

“Services that can offer consumers the opportunity to keep their wardrobes fresh on an ongoing basis are really benefiting,” Sky Canaves, an analyst at market research firm eMarketer, said in a recent NPR story about online rentals.

Armoire remains a smaller operation than competitors such as Rent-the-Runway and Nuuly, which is part of a conglomerate including Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie and Free People. Her customer base is thousands, Singh said, but not hundreds of thousands.

The success of the bigger outlets are useful as they demonstrate that the model works, she said. “Rental continues to grow and so we’re benefiting from that.”