The 29-Year-Old Who Rocked Facebook Has Big Data Plans for H&M

Fashion retailer Hennes & Mauritz AB wants to get a better sense of what makes its customers tick. To help it, the Swedish company just hired a man best known for revealing a data privacy scandal that rocked Facebook Inc. and raised serious questions around how some corners of technology are shaping human existence. At H&M, 29-year-old Christopher Wylie will help the company use big data and artificial intelligence to make sure it actually designs things shoppers want. If successful, the Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower might be able to help fix some of H&M's most pressing issues, including getting its inventory under control and ultimately making the company more profitable. "If you better understand what people like to wear, and how they like to wear it, and how they want to feel when they're wearing it, you'll naturally start to create insights as to modernizing and updating your collection," Wylie said in an interview at H&M's Stockholm headquarters on Thursday.