As we enter a brand new 12 months, the retail business continues to evolve on the pace of AI. Walmart Chief Government Officer Doug McMillon just lately noticed that generative AI’s comparatively brief cycle occasions are serving to his firm be taught and innovate sooner to higher anticipate buyer wants.1 I’m energized to see the constructive affect that the tempo of AI innovation is bringing to the retail world.
This time final 12 months, I used to be having conversations with retailers around the globe who couldn’t wait to faucet the seemingly limitless potential of AI. For a lot of of them, although, translating that promise into bottom-line affect took time. Whereas many retailers had been already deploying AI instruments to drive elevated income and reimagine cumbersome enterprise processes, most had been nonetheless determining the place to start and the way particularly AI might assist them acquire an edge out there. At this time, the conversations I’ve are extra sharply targeted on figuring out AI use instances that may assist retailers develop income and enhance profitability throughout the worth chain. To realize these objectives, retailers are starting to develop a wealthy agentic world marked by a vivid tapestry of AI brokers. Along with brokers for app growth, compliance, info safety, and different broad, cross-organizational enterprise course of wants, retailers are already deploying customized agentic options to enhance core retail eventualities, like procuring and retailer operations. A brand new period of AI is right here.
Microsoft Cloud for Retail
Join your prospects, your individuals, and your knowledge
This 12 months at NRF 2025, we’re excited and proud to exhibit how our knowledge options, Copilots, and customizable retail brokers are serving to to guide this shift throughout each retail phase. We’re simply as wanting to showcase how straightforward we’ve made it for retailers to maximise the success of their AI investments on the Microsoft Copilot and AI stack—essentially the most superior platform for creating AI options that drive retail progress and profitability. Utilized by over 100,000 organizations worldwide, Microsoft Copilot Studio gives over 1,400 prebuilt plugins and connectors to combine your whole knowledge, APIs, and different third-party companies. And with the disclosing of Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, organizations can simplify and scale their AI workloads with confidence. The identical AI platform that we construct our Microsoft Copilots on is now obtainable to retailers. With essentially the most versatile stack of AI growth instruments, we’re dedicated to serving to our prospects push the frontiers of what’s attainable with agentic retail and be prepared for regardless of the future could maintain.
Briefly, our mission is to assist our prospects turn out to be Retail Prepared.
What does it imply to be Retail Prepared?
In immediately’s quickly evolving retail panorama, being “Retail Prepared” means extra than simply maintaining with traits. It’s about being forward-thinking and making good expertise investments with the facility to develop the topline whereas bettering the underside line. Along with our companions, Microsoft Cloud for Retail supplies AI that’s constructed for the longer term, prepared now. With our deep buyer relationships and complete associate community, we’re uniquely positioned to assist retailers throughout all segments discover new worth with AI. Our options allow retailers to remodel the consumer journey, empower the retail workforce of the longer term, create agile, sustainable provide chains, and unlock the potential of their knowledge.
Customized Buying Agent improves the procuring expertise for customers with a context-aware conversational assistant to assist them discover the proper merchandise for his or her wants. Retailer Operations Agent places protected, company-governed generative AI within the palms of retailer associates to allow them to spend much less time trying to find product info or solutions to retailer insurance policies and procedures and extra time serving to prospects. And retail knowledge options in Microsoft Material give retailers the facility to unify and enrich a variety of retail knowledge sources, enabling real-time, actionable insights.
To be taught extra about how Microsoft’s retail brokers and AI options are serving to buyer turn out to be Retail Prepared, learn AI-powered retail: Elevating buyer expertise and operational effectivity.
Remodel the consumer journey
In immediately’s extremely aggressive retail panorama, personalization has turn out to be the usual. Bain Consulting Group estimates that retailers can enhance income by 5% to 10% via AI personalization instruments.3 However the stakes may be excessive. Because the expertise turns into extra widespread, prospects are starting to count on tailor-made experiences and reacting extra strongly to ineffective personalization. To ship the optimum buyer journey, retailers are more and more turning to generative AI-powered options that assist them reply shopper inquiries, handle digital procuring carts, tailor advertising and marketing and product suggestions, ship enhanced search capabilities, elevate customer support interactions, and extra. By partaking with prospects early of their procuring journey, conversational commerce brokers and different AI personalization instruments are boosting buyer satisfaction and driving top-line progress.
- A major instance of the success of gen AI-powered conversational commerce is Walmart’s integration of OpenAI’s GPT-4 into its voice order and Textual content to Store options. This innovation permits prospects to seek for gadgets, place orders, and schedule pickups or deliveries with human-like, interactive responses all through the complete shopping for journey.
- Tub & Physique Works just lately launched Gingham Genius, a generative AI-powered conversational commerce answer that helps prospects uncover the best perfume custom-made to their distinctive preferences. This modern answer guides new prospects of their perfume exploration, introduces current prospects to new scents and merchandise, proposes options for discontinued fragrances, and gives customized present suggestions primarily based on particular person tastes.
- Recognizing that as much as 80% of tire purchases begin with a go to to a retailer’s web site, Canadian Tire Company constructed a conversational commerce app utilizing OpenAI Service and OpenAI’s GPT-4. Named CeeTee, the app helps prospects determine the proper tires for his or her wants early within the procuring journey, rising alternatives for conversion and boosting model loyalty.
- Retailers like Natuzzi and Gardens Alive are leveraging Dynamics 365 Contact Heart and Dynamics 365 Buyer Service to remodel customer support with generative AI. These options allow customized buyer journeys by answering inquiries, tailoring suggestions, and streamlining operations, creating seamless self- and assisted-service experiences that win buyer loyalty.
- The Dynamics 365 platform is enabling connoisseur chocolatier Venchi to ship a personalised omnichannel procuring expertise to prospects and enhance clienteling on the level of sale.
Be a part of Kathleen Mitford, Microsoft Company Vice President of International Trade Advertising on Monday, January 13, 2025 on the Large Concepts stage at NRF 2025 for Remodel the consumer journey to be taught extra from Thilina Gunasinghe, Chief Digital and Know-how Officer at Tub and Physique Works, Fabio Tormen, Chief Info Officer at Venchi, and Kathie Johnson, Chief Advertising Officer at Sitecore.
Empower the retail workforce of the longer term
At Microsoft, we’re devoted to growing AI instruments that enrich the worker expertise with the entry and insights they should ship distinctive buyer interactions. Whether or not via the usage of our Retailer Operations Agent or via a customized partner-developed implementation, retailers now have the facility to raise their retail workforce, making them extra agile and attentive to buyer wants, and staff are prepared for AI. The 2024 Work Traits Index discovered that 84% say AI helps them be extra inventive and deal with crucial work.2
I’m actually excited in regards to the distinctive and modern methods our prospects are deploying AI to empower their retail workforces. Listed below are just a few notable examples:
- Swedish retailer Lindex customized its Lindex Copilot to know retailer affiliate roles and duties and supply tailor-made steering that helps staff ship contextually related and customized help.
- With their customized ChatCTC worker digital assistant, Canadian Tire Company is saving its 3,000+ company staff 30 to 60 minutes a day, liberating them from mundane duties to deal with higher-value buyer experiences.
- Utilizing Retailer Operations Agent, staff at main Nordic retailer Kappahl can now use generative AI to securely floor product info and retailer insurance policies and procedures in seconds, rising retailer affiliate productiveness and upleveling the procuring expertise for patrons.
- MediaMarktSaturn’s MyBuddy voice-navigated in-ear AI agent—developed in partnership with Accenture/Avanade and leveraging Customized Buying Agent—permits retailer associates to “store” the shop catalog for one of the best merchandise for the purchasers. This answer boosts buyer confidence and enhances staff’ product data to profit from conversion alternatives on the level of sale.
Be a part of me on Sunday, January 12, 2025 on the Large Concepts stage at NRF 2025 for Retail prepared: AI constructed for the longer term, prepared now, to listen to from Walmart and Aaron Berg, Vice President, Digital Transformation at Walmart, and Cari Covent, Head of AI and Rising Know-how at Canadian Tire in regards to the alternatives and challenges for organizations bringing generative AI to their workforces.
Create an agile, sustainable provide chain
Lowering out-of-stocks isn’t the one means retailers can get forward. Many retailers are discovering the advantages of a extra sustainable provide chain, from elevated buyer satisfaction to rising provide chain resilience. Not surprisingly, Gartner finds high provide chain organizations are utilizing AI to optimize processes at greater than twice the speed of low performing friends.4
Let’s have a look at a few the highest provide chain targeted retailers utilizing AI.
- The Netherlands’ largest grocer, Albert Heijn, got down to scale back meals waste by (amongst different issues) bettering the effectivity and precision of its provide chain. Utilizing generative AI instruments that assist meals arrive to the purpose of sale at most freshness and dynamically discounting costs to encourage customers to purchase earlier than that meals is not contemporary, Albert Heijn helps save greater than 250,000 kilos of meals from going to waste.
- SPAR ICS, the unbiased IT unit of SPAR Austria Group, created an award-winning, AI-enabled demand forecasting system. With the brand new system, SPAR Austria Group is optimizing its provide chain and attaining 90 % stock prediction accuracy.
- Main Australian retailer Coles has launched a five-year strategic partnership with Microsoft to develop Coles’ world-leading edge computing platform, Clever Edge Spine (IEB). Coles and Microsoft will co-innovate to discover how the IEB can join and handle IoT gadgets throughout Coles’ provide chain and into shops to advance Coles’ sustainability objectives, enhance buyer experiences, scale back inventory loss, and increase crew member productiveness and security.
Be a part of Gina Claxton, Microsoft CVP, US Retail and Shopper Items, Avanade, and 1-800-Flowers.com on Monday, January thirteenth on the Large Concepts stage for Promoting roses: Avanade presents – the 1-800-Flowers story to find out how the enterprise has flourished by staying agile and modern, shifting early to thrive within the .com period, and now doing the identical within the AI age with the assistance of Microsoft and Avanade.
Unlock the potential of your knowledge
For retailers searching for to know their prospects, it’s onerous to overstate the worth of an information platform that permits them to leverage all of their knowledge whereas minimizing danger via sturdy safety and governance. Gartner forecasts that via 2025, 80% of organizations searching for to scale digital enterprise will fail as a result of they don’t take a contemporary strategy to knowledge governance.5 Conversely, the AI alternatives are seemingly limitless for the retailers who’re in a position to unify and safe their retail knowledge and switch it into buyer worth.
Right here’s how a few of our prospects are utilizing Microsoft’s knowledge platform and AI options to unlock the potential of their knowledge:
- The ASOS crew is utilizing Azure AI Foundry to develop customized AI options that pull and embed data of traits as they floor, enabling them to curate and share gadgets with customers primarily based on a deep data of the most recent traits.
- Saucony optimized buyer acquisition throughout Black Friday and Cyber Monday by way of a customized AI mannequin developed in partnership with Yobi, resulting in a robust surge in new prospects in simply weeks.
- With the assistance of the Microsoft Material knowledge platform, Chanel is deploying generative AI securely for vital duties like content material creation, personalization, high quality monitoring, provide chain administration, real-time translations, and gross sales aftercare.
- Microsoft Azure’s suite of instruments helped Brazilian retail chain Quick Store put together their knowledge property for AI transformation by way of improved knowledge reliability, sooner knowledge supply, enhanced knowledge governance, safety, and self-service entry for its strains of enterprise.
Be a part of Keith Mercier, Microsoft Vice President, WW Retail and CG Trade on Tuesday, January 14, 2025 on the Large Concepts stage at NRF 2025 for The way forward for AI in retail to listen to how Microsoft, Lenovo, and Intel are equipping prospects and companions with the options they should implement AI on the edge.
Wanting to be taught how one can turn out to be Retail Prepared? Go to the Microsoft sales space at NRF 2025 to see our AI demos in motion, together with hands-on experiences within the Copilot Agent Zone. And obtain Microsoft’s 2025 retail report The AI Benefit: How retailers are shaping buyer experiences with data-driven insights, produced together with Cascade Insights.
Be taught extra
1 Yahoo Finance, Walmart is the 2024 Yahoo Finance Firm of the Yr, December 2024.
2 Microsoft, 2024 Work Pattern Index Annual Report, Could 2024.
3 Bain & Firm, Retail and Gen AI: Now Scale These Terrific Early Returns, Could 2024.
Shelley Bransten, Company Vice President, International Retail, Shopper Items & Gaming industries, grew up in retail. She’s a passionate advocate for patrons and works tirelessly to make sure they’re arrange for achievement. Throughout her time at Microsoft, she has overseen groundbreaking partnerships with main manufacturers and retailers throughout the globe. Shelley additionally sits on a number of boards together with NRF, RILA, and Trove.
