- Self-made multimillionaire Emma Grede has built billion-dollar brands with the Kardashians (including shapewear and clothing brand company Skims), sits on the board for the Obama Foundation, and has just teamed up with tennis champion Coco Gauff on a mentorship campaign with UPS. But while scaling businesses and mentoring others come naturally to her, Grede admits she needed a mentor moment of her own when it came to artificial intelligence. And that moment came courtesy of fellow Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban, Grede exclusively tells Fortune.
The British-born entrepreneur Emma Grede, best known as the founding partner of Kim Kardashian’s $4 billion shapewear empire Skims and the CEO of denim brand Good American, has built a reputation on spotting cultural shifts before they hit the mainstream.
When her and Khloe Kardashian’s Good American denim line dropped, it made $1 million on day one, making it the biggest denim launch in apparel history. Grede has helped redefine inclusion in retail and became the first Black female investor on Shark Tank—all before turning 45.
Now she’s bringing that same playbook to small businesses through a new UPS campaign alongside tennis star Coco Gauff. The initiative sees Grede mentoring creators of emerging female-led brands and offering one-on-one coaching to help them scale.
But while mentoring others comes naturally to her, Grede admits that when it came to AI, she was the one who needed a pep talk—and fellow Shark Tank star Mark Cuban was the one who gave her the push to come to grips with the new technology.
In an exclusive interview with Fortune, Grede talked about an episode of her hit podcast show Aspire that hadn’t aired yet, where the two sat down and compared their AI usage.
“I was already kind of getting there, but if I’m really honest, that episode where we really delved into AI gave me a new urgency around how I use AI,” she recalled, adding that Cuban had a staggering 60 AI apps on his phone. “Yeah, he gave me a kick.”
As soon as the recording wrapped up, she said that she started looking into AI courses at the Wharton School and Harvard for this fall. “I need to figure this out, because I’m using AI like a 42-year-old woman,” Grede candidly admitted while laughing.
Grede gave her staff a cash bonus for using AI—long before she realized she was behind
Grede isn’t completely new to AI. In fact, she was ahead of the curve when it came to encouraging AI adoption within her companies.
“About two years ago I put a note out in my office giving a cash bonus to anyone that uses AI in their work,” she explained, adding that the incentive was a big hit—especially with the marketing and finance teams.
“It changed the office. It changed the way people presented their work. It changed the way people did their work.”
But as her Gen Z and thirtysomething staff embraced experimenting with ChatGPT and other new AI launches at the time, Grede admitted that she perhaps leaned too heavily on them. It meant that until recently, she’s been using AI more as a search engine and leaving her staff to handle the rest.
“I was like, Emma, you need to sort that out.”
It comes as many other CEOs are scrambling to appoint AI leaders, future-proof their business, and brace for change.
Billionaire Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates says AI is moving at a speed that “surprises” even him and that even if workers learn how to use the latest tech tools, they may still find themselves out of a job. Meanwhile, an ex-Google exec says CEOs are currently too busy “celebrating” their efficiency gains to see they’re next on AI’s chopping board.
But she’s not using AI to make her more productive
As one of America’s richest self-made women—with a reported net worth of nearly $400 million and at least four major businesses to her name—Grede is clearly ruthlessly efficient. But in her eyes, AI isn’t about squeezing even more productivity from her day.
“I’m probably the most productive person in the world. I don’t know that I can be that more productive,” she said, noting that her time is mostly spent making high-stakes decisions—not executing tasks.
“There’s no amount of AI that can help me with that.”
But where it can help, she said, is in making smarter strategic choices and reshaping how she leads.
“I think it’s a reframing of how we’re going to do things,” Grede added. “So much of my job is about making really big bets and decisions. And so if I can put data in places to optimize that decision making, I think that that’s probably where I’m going to be using it most.
“When you start to think about my role as a merchant and as a planner, it’s really those things that I think are going to fundamentally shift.”
In her podcast episode with Cuban, which has since been released, the television personality and Dallas Mavericks owner had a stark warning for founders who don’t embrace AI: “You’re f–ked…That’s like saying, back in the day, ‘I don’t need to use a PC, I don’t need to use the internet. I don’t need a cell phone.’”
He added, “If you’re an entrepreneur, or want to be an entrepreneur, start playing with it to get a sense for how it works, how to prompt. It becomes like having an entire staff of 1,000 business professors.”
