Sitecore, a leading provider of end-to-end composable digital experience software, is partnering with Microsoft to support retailers as they transform their business. The Sitecore OrderCloud connector (preview) is uniquely positioned as the first partner-developed commerce platform integration in Microsoft Fabric, which can help retailers speed up their ability to deliver AI-enabled digital experiences.

Unifying data for actionable AI insights

For retailers to truly deliver personalized experiences through generative AI for their customers, the first step is to break data silos within their organizations and get a holistic understanding of their data estate. A unified data platform is the key to unlocking deeper insights and gives retailers the ability to drive more meaningful experiences for customers. Retailers can open the door to next-generation retail data solutions and more actionable insights with a unified data estate. Achieving data compatibility is also the first step to getting value from AI investments. With retail data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, we are giving customers a single place for all their data analytics.

Retailers can build an AI-ready data estate with retail data solutions in Microsoft Fabric by:

• Unifying retail data from disparate systems: Simplify retail data integration and use the same copy of data without needing to move it from its original source.
• Creating new shopping experiences: Accelerate time to market with application templates purpose-built for the most common retail use cases and powered by AI.
• Reimagining retail with next-generation AI: Use custom models to improve shopper recommendations, optimize product placement, store layout, and more.

Partners like Sitecore connect to and build on top of the platform to further help retailers overcome data incompatibility and unlock new capabilities in Microsoft Cloud for Retail. Sitecore offers an ecosystem of diverse solutions designed to enable retail customers to power commerce and orchestrate content intelligently. The Sitecore content-to-commerce portfolio is built on Microsoft Azure, using the cloud platform’s ecosystem of scalable storage, automation, and application deployment across the globe. Sitecore’s OrderCloud connectivity in Microsoft Fabric gives customers instant access to AI-enabled commerce, as well as data and analytics tooling and more, to empower leaders to enhance and scale the delivery of these channel-less commerce experiences customers expect.

Unlocking the power of AI to enhance digital experiences

The Sitecore OrderCloud connector in Microsoft Fabric helps retailers unify product, customer profile, and order data seamlessly across digital channels on a common industry data model—making it easier to take advantage of AI-powered enhancements, analytics tooling, and commerce and business administration capabilities. This ultimately helps brands deliver the unified, channel-less experience that meets today’s shopper expectations.

“We can’t forget what AI stands for—Artificial Intelligence. To effectively employ AI in your retail business, you need to equip AI with your customer data, product information, and business transactions to start. This is what Sitecore and Microsoft built together for retailers: Every customer, every product, every transaction, every channel and touchpoint—all of your data available in Microsoft Fabric in real-time. This enables retailers to adopt AI at disruptive rates, delivering transactable, AI-powered experiences, such as shopper copilots or conversational commerce.” 

Jake Hookom, Vice President of Product, Sitecore OrderCloud

Traditionally, commerce platforms only served foundational needs like launching a storefront, automating operations, and reducing friction. The focus has shifted, catering to customer demand for seamless, authentic shopping experiences that do more than just sell a product. Customers want personalized experiences that both assist and delight. Sitecore OrderCloud helps retailers use cloud-native and composable architecture that easily evolves, scales, and helps harness the power of application programming interfaces (APIs) to support a full tech stack. Adopting a channel-less approach for customer experience is crucial, and AI is indispensable for efficiently delivering interconnected, personalized digital experiences—making it a strategic necessity for brand success. Together, Microsoft and Sitecore are dedicated to delivering AI-powered enhancements that will lead to: 

• Improved consumer engagement: By automating asset creation for advertising and campaigns, innovating with smart, user-generated content, and managing brand presence and representation across channels. 
• Intelligent marketing and store operations: By improving customer experience through more in-depth analysis of customer calls and complaints through automated summaries, and by enhancing employee experience by automating report generation and workforce scheduling for store managers. 
• Streamlined back-office management: By improving response time and accuracy of internal communications, IT and HR helpdesk tickets, and procurement matters. 
• Automated innovation: Automating everything from product descriptions to marketing emails, onboarding training, and enablement of employees. 

Discover retail solutions 

• Learn more about Sitecore OrderCloud connector today.
• If you are a partner and would like to start working with Microsoft Cloud for Retail, please fill out this form for more information.  

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The importance of data in AI-driven retail fuels the algorithms, insights, and personalized experiences that are increasingly integral to success of the modern retailer. The ability to collect, harmonize, and derive meaningful insights from vast amounts of data empowers retailers to make informed decisions, create personalized experiences, and stay competitive. Understanding that data is key to success, we’ve also released retail data solutions in Microsoft Fabric—helping retailers to standardize and enrich raw data with connectors to engage customers more effectively. Read on to learn how you and your employees can maximize benefits from your data.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

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Optimize shopper experiences with personalization  

Generative AI models have vastly improved the experience of chatting with virtual assistants—providing expert advice and bringing ease and convenience to online shoppers. The copilot template for personalized shopping on Azure OpenAI Service (preview) enables retailers to build tailored shopping experiences that allow consumers to shop using natural language. Online shopping is now akin to consulting with a specialist in a store. Personalized shopping taps into the retailer’s vast expertise and knowledge base to apply across shopping situations with the convenience of anytime, anywhere availability. Using a retailer’s current systems and data, this copilot template can be embedded into existing experiences, such as a website or app, making it easier for shoppers to find and purchase the products they want. With the prebuilt copilot template, retailers can offer customers personalized expert advice as well as guide the shopper to find unexpected items and learn more about the retailer. For example, a shopper going camping for the first time asking for clothing recommendations will get suggestions for clothing as well as complementary gear with personalized advice based on the customer’s history and preferences, such as color, style, and design and cross referenced with publicly available information such as destination, weather, and time of year as it relates to the customer’s trip.

The copilot template is designed to be easy for any retailer to use. Its open architecture lets each organization leverage existing investments in commerce, inventory, and personalization solutions to support a wide range of buying environments, including e-commerce sites and mobile apps. Designed to have interactive discussions with shoppers, the copilot template can be adapted to each seller’s brand and values, responds to shopper questions, and facilitates decision-making to create a personalized experience that feels natural and easygoing. 

Increase productivity and efficiency with copilot template for store operations   

Whether associates are long-term employees or seasonal workers, empowering the workforce and optimizing their performance is critical to customer satisfaction and retailer success. With the new generative AI-powered copilot template for store operations on Azure OpenAI Service (preview), retailers can build technology that allows frontline workers to quickly and easily access the information needed for their work day, increasing productivity and efficiency with text and voice commands.  

Retail frontline workers can easily get answers to questions on store operating procedures like how to handle refunds or set up product displays. Using natural language, associates can ask questions about the product catalog to support shoppers, review HR policies and benefits, or complete surveys. Copilot template for store operations enables workers to independently manage issues such as addressing damaged items. For example, with a few prompts, an associate can ask copilot template for store operations for the company’s standard operating procedure for replacing damaged products. In addition to getting the right steps to handle the process, the associate can also create a task to replace products and send an alert through Microsoft Teams to the store manager. Copilot template for store operations reduces the need for pen and paper, data in multiple systems, or the retail frontline tracking down the store manager for every problem that arises.  

Likewise, the copilot template for store operations helps store managers optimize the work experience for their associates and deliver improved customer experiences. They can ask Microsoft Teams for a summary of key performance indicators (KPIs)—such as sales, inventory, and customer feedback. Using copilot template for store operations, a manager can quickly create tasks and assign associates to address. Copilot template for store operations provides retailers insights and information in the normal flow of work, helping managers and associates increase productivity and responsiveness. Finally, the copilot template, when used in combination with Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Dataverse capabilities empowers customers to seamlessly connect data across multiple line-of-business systems to generate AI-driven recommendations and actionable solutions that will help store associates make the right decisions.

Gain actionable insights fast with retail data solutions in Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is a complete analytics platform built for the era of AI. It enables the transformation of data into predictive insights, to ensure better business outcomes and reduce costly data replication and movement to support data analysts and data scientists. With these solutions in place, organizations can also automate duplicative tasks resulting in data efficiency and resource management.   The self-serve ability enables organizations to equip everyone in the company with their own access to these powerful analytics. Underscoring all of this is a commitment to help keep data secure and protected in a single source while meeting stringent compliance requirements.  

Retail data solutions in Microsoft Fabric are a set of industry-specific capabilities that enable customers to accelerate time to insight generation by unifying, enriching, and modelling industry data in Microsoft Fabric​. Organizations can plan, architect, and design data solutions for data governance, reporting, business intelligence, and advanced analytics. Using data definition, formats, and storage enhancement, a standardized data model is created to help organizations derive actionable insights from large volumes of retailer data. Retail data solutions in Microsoft Fabric provide seamless integration across different systems and applications. By establishing a foundation for naming, data classification, and access controls, retailers can be assured effective governance of their data. 

Sitecore OrderCloud connector enhances your digital capabilities 

Sitecore OrderCloud connector, one of the key capabilities of retail data solutions, gives you a quick and reliable platform to get commerce data onto Microsoft retail industry standard schema. The connector performs transformation and orchestration on top of the data from Sitecore OrderCloud to align with the data model. The connector works across three key data sets:   

1. Products: All the sellable products available in Sitecore OrderCloud. 
2. Customers: End customers who are shopping from your e-commerce portals. 
3. Orders: Customer generated online sales orders.  

The key role of the connector is to get data into the retail data solutions schema, giving users the benefit of access to solutions that are built on top of retail data solutions. Microsoft Power BI reports on sales, products, and customer data solutions can be enabled on top of Sitecore OrderCloud data out of box. 

The connector ensures that no personal customer information is transferred when using Dataverse and Microsoft Power Platform capabilities such as Power BI reports and other related solutions. The Power BI reports provide actionable insights on top of data. Each report provides a specific view of data across sales, customers, and products that can help make impactful merchandising, marketing, and supply chain decisions.  

“Sitecore OrderCloud delivers limitless commerce capabilities and opportunities to consolidate commerce channels into a single managed marketplace. The out-of-the-box integration with Microsoft Fabric unlocks the ability to be a forward-looking AI retail organization. Retail organizations can benefit from stateful services, reliable messaging, orchestration, monitoring, and security, while continuing to focus on their roadmap and strategic business objectives.” 

Steven Davis, Vice President of Engineering Commerce, Sitecore 

Make strategic product decisions with frequently bought together

Lastly, with this release, retailers can make informed decisions about product placement and promotions when using the frequently bought together application model for Smart store analytics. This model provides insights and recommendations and applies data science to unearth deeper insights into store performance. Retailers can forecast foot traffic, group products that are frequently bought together and understand products substitutions to optimize store operations and increase customer satisfaction.

Frequently bought together analytics enables retailers to: 

• Find the top revenue products and boost cross-sales by putting identified products closer. 
• Check the lowest revenue products and decide which ones to drop from the product catalogue. 
• Measure how past marketing actions, like new shelf layout or promotion performance, affected the sales of each item in a product group by comparing before and after sales revenues when purchased together. 

Learn more

• Join us at NRF 2024 from January 13 to 16, 2024 in New York City, New York to learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Retail’s cutting-edge AI technologies and how they can optimize your business.
• Join Shelley Bransten at the Microsoft Retail Digital Forum on February 6, 2024 for the How AI Unlocks Value for Retail session to learn about the research and gain insights into what is driving AI transformation among leading retailers.
• To get started, you can sign up here or learn more about our latest capabilities on the Microsoft Cloud for Retail homepage. 

The post Microsoft Cloud for Retail unlocks a new level of productivity with AI appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Microsoft has long recognized that innovation starts with data. But one major obstacle is siloed data—that’s where Azure Data Manager for Agriculture comes in. With Azure Data Manager, customers and partners like Land O’Lakes, Bayer, and others across the agri-food value chain have access to industry-specific data connectors and capabilities to unify relevant data from disparate sources. This empowers organizations with high quality datasets to accelerate the development and adoption of digital agriculture solutions. Instead of devoting resources to data management or duplicating work others have already done, organizations can accelerate product innovation, building differentiated solutions with the ability to leverage readily available, high-quality, and abundant data: from satellites, soil sensors, farming equipment, weather providers, and more.

Organizations can use in-house development or third-party services to take advantage of Azure Data Manager for Agriculture capabilities, speeding the path to comprehensive analytics and business intelligence solutions delivering insight into soil, vegetation, plant health, carbon sequestration, pest and disease management, environmental impact, and more. With a strong data foundation, organizations can focus on driving outcomes across a wide variety of use cases: from precision farming, detailed risk analysis for insurers, timely supply planning for ingredients, and accurate tracking of product provenance.

But access to data is just the first step in our journey to empowering industry transformation.

Harnessing data, fueling innovation, and scaling sustainability

Across industries, the transformative power of AI and machine learning (ML) is increasing efficiency and productivity of companies worldwide. Agriculture is no exception.

As we recently announced, the latest updates to Azure Data Manager for Agriculture are ushering in the era of AI in agriculture. Bringing cloud-scale data movement and transformation to agriculture-specific scenarios with integrations to Microsoft Fabric, Azure Data Manager for Agriculture is unlocking new opportunities across the ecosystem. With Fabric Data Factory, third-party data partners can build connectors to ingest data from more sources into a unified database, unlocking new insights across the business.

These advancements also support the real-world application of language models in agriculture. Enabling the seamless retrieval of data mapped to farm operations, sensors, weather, and imagery, these language model capabilities allow farming-related context, insights, activities, and outcomes to be queried using conversational, natural language prompts in a chat interface. With generative AI capabilities across use cases throughout the agri-food value chain, farmers and organizations will gain access to cutting-edge technologies to maximize yield and optimize resources, while minimizing environmental impact. Soon stakeholders across the value chain will be able to simply ask an AI-powered chat bot questions and quickly receive a precise answer to help them work effectively. A farmer can ask “which field had rain last night?” to assess prioritize work across a sprawling operation, an insurer can see “which farms got hit by a hailstorm yesterday” to better understand potential damage, and an agronomist can compare yields of previous seasons with planting dates to offer more accurate precision farming guidance.

Bayer’s Crop Science division previewed their testing of a new copilot, built on top of Azure Data Manager for Agriculture. Users can ask the Bayer copilot about different scenarios, such as “which fields had in-season crop protection applications last year?” or “what’s the difference between the planting and harvested area across all my fields?”, allowing users to easily interact with complex agronomic data across fields, crops, and seasons by asking questions through a chat interface.

Cultivating revolutionary insights: Bayer and Azure Data Manager for Agriculture

Bayer is also leading the way in capturing the potential of Azure Data Manager for Agriculture more broadly: taking advantage of current capabilities and testing upcoming functionality within their farmer-facing Climate FieldView platform.

As an industry-leading digital-farming solution, FieldView is supporting over 220 million acres of farmland globally. That’s about twice the size of California. Leveraging Azure Data Manager’s connector architecture, FieldView will expand its connectivity to more data sources and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). This helps Bayer focus on the next generation of innovative digital solutions to help farmers succeed, while ensuring each farmer’s data stays private and protected.

Behind the scenes, Azure Data Manager for Agriculture is enabling Bayer’s Climate FieldView datasets, including weather and satellite imagery—making it easier for Bayer to provide rich data and insights to farmer customers. Upcoming Fabric integration with Azure Data Manager for Agriculture will allow Bayer teams to develop secure and compliant data connections even faster, making it viable for Bayer to quickly integrate new data streams and make them available to internal and external customers, driving value across agriculture and connected industries.

“Azure Data Manager for Agriculture takes care of the important data infrastructure and operational details, which frees up our Climate FieldView team to focus on delivering additional innovation for our farmer customers.”—Ines Kapphan: Data & Cloud Solutions, Bayer’s Crop Science division.

In fact, one of agriculture’s biggest technology challenges is an overall lack of data interoperability. Once initiated by a farmer, enterprise customers from across the agri-food value chain, such as retailers, financial institutions, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies can now connect and auto-sync planting, application, and harvest activity files from FieldView, enabling the exchange of data between solutions built on Azure Data Manager. Supported by a more connected ecosystem, farming operations can better optimize inputs, maximize profits, and produce crops that can feed and fuel increasing market demand.

The partnership between Microsoft and Bayer is a significant step forward in accomplishing Bayer’s ambitious target of 100 percent digitally-enabled sales in its Crop Science division by 2030. This also accelerates the ability to bring new value and deliver outcomes-based, digitally-enabled solutions to farming customers. Bayer is committed to setting a new standard for the industry in data-driven digital innovation.

Seeding a future of innovation and collaboration

Founded on the millions of data points available on Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, a new, robust ecosystem of digital solutions is emerging, unlocking industry-wide collaboration, offering game-changing information and insights to everyone in the value chain from farmers through to retailers and consumer packaged goods companies. With interactive and intuitive data insights, Azure Data Manager for Agriculture helps create a data foundation for customers across critical areas, such as detecting pest or disease issues, improving yield, predicting harvest windows, and identifying labor needs. By not only making actual planning and observational data more accessible, but also helping companies present insights in a human-centric format with generative AI, Azure Data Manager is helping lead the way into a more sustainable future.

Learn more about Azure Data Manager for Agriculture.

The post Harvesting AI-driven insights and efficiencies with agricultural data innovation appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

These data-driven tools—including transformative AI that is reshaping industries—depend on clean, unified data. That’s why we announced Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture in March 2023, a data platform that leverages industry-specific data connectors and capabilities to connect and unify farm data from disparate sources. With Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, organizations can leverage high-quality datasets for digital agriculture solutions, allowing customers and partners to focus on product innovation rather than data management.

Today, alongside Bayer at the AGRITECHNICA 2023 conference, we’re thrilled to announce the latest updates to Azure Data Manager for Agriculture that are ushering in an era of AI in agriculture.

A growing ecosystem of partners and data with Microsoft Fabric integrations

To start, Azure Data Manager for Agriculture is evolving to include new integrations with Microsoft Fabric. This begins with the inclusion of Microsoft Fabric Data Factory, bringing cloud-scale data movement and transformation to agriculture-specific scenarios. Now, third-party data partners can build connectors to ingest data from more sources into a unified database. Leveraging these Fabric integrations, Microsoft and our partners are expanding Azure Data Manager for Agriculture with more agriculture-specific connectors and capabilities so that insights are no longer limited by specific data types and sources.  

We’ve also built connector patterns that others can use as references and expanded the common data model to incorporate geospatial data, making more data integrations seamless and efficient. Given the importance of the ability to search through time and space when looking at observation data, geospatial ground truth data has been elevated to a first-class component.  

We are also excited to expand support for Bayer’s Climate FieldView as a built-in data source. Once initiated by a farmer, Azure Data Manager for Agriculture provides a straightforward path to retrieving both historic and up-to-date activity files, from which further aggregated insights can be derived. Users can leverage auto-sync planting, application, and harvest activity files from Climate FieldView accounts directly into Azure Data Manager for Agriculture.  

Microsoft and Bayer: Leveraging generative AI to enable interaction with data through language

But it doesn’t stop at data. We believe access to insights and data should be more interactive, intuitive, and entirely human-centric. Imagine, as a farmer, being able to simply ask the question: “Which fields had rain last night?” or “How many acres have been harvested?” and receiving a precise and accurate answer, immediately.  

With new large language model APIs in Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, generative AI in agriculture is now a reality. The large language model APIs enable the seamless retrieval of data mapped to farm operations, sensors, weather, and imagery so that farming-related context and insights can be queried in a conversational context. These capabilities enable others to build their own agriculture copilots that deliver insights to customers and farmers about disease, yield, labor needs, harvest windows, and more—leveraging actual planning and observational data.  

Bayer is the first partner bringing these large language model capabilities to life with a copilot for agriculture. In its early stages, Bayer is presenting an agriculture copilot and testing multiple scenarios with internal teams to discover where large language model capabilities can add value through the ability to interact with agronomic data using natural language.

The Bayer copilot for agriculture is a querying system that helps end users like dealers and farmers get actionable insights from their farm and environment data. Users ask the AI-powered chatbot about different scenarios and the copilot provides accurate responses almost instantly.

Building on a foundation of innovation 

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture has already enabled incredible evolutions in Agriculture with partners like Accenture, Bayer, and Land O’Lakes.  

By integrating disparate data sources and streamlining them into a unified interface, Accenture’s Farm of the Future empowers farmers to track and manage their sustainability initiatives more effectively. Built on Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, the solution provides comprehensive oversight of a farm’s sustainability practices. Advanced analytics deliver actionable insights that help farmers optimize resource allocation, minimize environmental impact, and maximize overall agricultural productivity and profitability.  

Bayer’s Climate FieldView platform uses Azure Data Manager for Agriculture’s satellite and weather pipelines and common data model to enable insights on potential yield-limiting factors in growers’ fields. Thanks to Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture, Bayer can remain focused on building intelligent solutions for growers, rather than investing time and resources in data management. 

Land O’Lakes is using Azure Data Manager for Agriculture to reduce time spent on data integrations, thereby cutting down engineering efforts and costs.

“Our job is to bring all the information together to make sense of it. Azure Data Manager for Agriculture is helping us do that.”

Tom Ryan, President at Truterra, the sustainability division of Land O’Lakes

Land O’Lakes data scientists are now able to derive better insights through comprehensive analytics and intelligent modeling—ultimately supporting more efficient, sustainable farming.  

Learn more about our agriculture solutions

If you’re interested in learning more about our commitment to innovation in agriculture, come visit us at Bayer’s booth (Hall 8, Booth C15) at AGRITECHNICA 2023 in Hanover, Germany the week of November 12 to 18, 2023. We’ll be presenting several sessions, including:  

• November 12, 2023—Recent advancements in large language modelling applied to agriculture
  Learn how AI technology can be applied to agriculture through an improved and efficient enhancement to analytics processing—offering increased insights at the speed of a question. This session will discuss what’s available today and what the near-term future holds.
• November 13, 2023—Advancements in technology targeting the Agriculture and food value chain 
  Hear various organizational perspectives about recent advancements in agriculture that support data interoperability, improved transparency across agricultural value chains, accelerated farm and food innovation, and the partnerships driving this change. 

For additional information, visit the Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture website. The future is bright, as generative AI and other analytics solutions enable insights around optimizing resource allocation, minimizing environmental impact, maximizing agricultural productivity, and much more.

The post Evolving Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture to transform data into intuitive insights appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail is designed to support resilient retail by providing retailers with the tools and insights they need to quickly adjust to changing conditions and seize new opportunities. Retailers are looking to accelerate their digital capabilities to give consumers what they want and show store associates that they are the most valuable asset. Our latest solutions, made to help retailers elevate the shopping experience and empower store associates, are now generally available.

Maximize the value of your data

Become a resilient retailer—and drive sustained profitability and growth—with Microsoft Cloud for Retail.

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Optimize in-store shopping experience and store operations with the Smart Store Analytics app

Smart stores are brick-and-mortar retail establishments that use a variety of smart technology to track shoppers and shopping behavior—from product discovery through purchase—and use this intelligence to enhance the in-store shopping experience. The Microsoft Cloud for Retail Smart Store Analytics solution provides insights using anonymized data about shoppers’ in-store journeys. The solution enables merchandising managers to monitor their stores and make data-driven decisions to optimize store performance. Managers are provided with indicators including a built-in AI model that supplies a view into items commonly purchased together. The AI model, developed specifically for the retail industry, uses checkout data to help understand shopper behavior and allows retailers to make decisions based on rich behavioral information uniquely available in smart stores—including shopper actions such as picking up or returning an item, or lingering in front of the shelf.

Smart Store Analytics gives retailers analytics and insights to make sense of their data and grow their business. Store managers can assess the number of items moving from shelf to cart—monitoring window shopper data against paying customer data and determining how quickly customers check out while maintaining individual customer privacy. Additionally, the shopper heatmap helps managers understand which aisles are highly trafficked versus not. This way the store can avoid putting products that need clearing in the dead zone areas. Changes to complementary product placement, ordering frequency, and promotional opportunities can also be made based on the recommendations provided by the AI model. The ability to provide insights allows retailers to adjust their operations to improve customer experience. This can help to reduce wait times for customers, improve product placement, and optimize staffing levels.

Żabka, one of the world’s most innovative companies in retail, operates more than 50 AI-powered autonomous nano stores that offer customers the convenience of a digital experience in physical stores. Żabka is partnering with Microsoft and AiFi, the largest provider of autonomous shopping solutions, to enhance its autonomous self-operating stores while also delivering great customer experiences. ​Fusing AiFi’s rich shopper interaction data with Microsoft Retail AI models can help store operators make data-driven decisions in areas such as store layout, product catalog, shelf placement, and shelf inventory optimization. Together, AiFi, Microsoft, and Żabka will help customers continuously optimize in-store operations and enhance the end-user experience.

Transform store associate experience and streamline store operations

Frontline workers have historically been underserved by workplace technology. A Microsoft Work Trends survey found that one in three retail associates say they do not have sufficient tools and technology to complete their increasingly complex duties.¹ With the Microsoft Cloud for Retail Store Operations Assist, store associates can be more productive with the ability to conduct typical business processes such as inventory counts, stock audits, store walks, shift change checks, incident reporting, and safety audits—from their own or store-provided tablet or mobile devices. Store managers can digitally review and provide feedback, support associates, and see their store’s performance in real-time from anywhere.

Through Store Operations Assist, store associates can establish informed and meaningful relationships with customers based on their preferences, behaviors, and purchases. Associates can have targeted conversations with customers, through a 360-customer view in a single unified dashboard. Store Operations Assist also enables the associate to capture leads and set up appointments with product and service experts. From the customer’s perspective, this adds personalization, giving them a satisfying shopping experience.

The value of partnership

Microsoft Cloud for industries is built with partners in mind. The latest generally available solutions showcase Microsoft’s approach to delivering flexible and reusable components for partners to build on. The partnership with AiFi and their Autonomous Shopping solution is an example of the collaboration that we strive for with all our partners and a win for our shared customers.

We are also excited about the continued work dozens of our partners are creating for retailers. Independent software vendors (ISVs) such as Blue Yonder with their Order Management solution help retailers rapidly optimize the entire click-to-deliver journey, starting with an engaging customer experience through last-mile delivery. Accenture | Avanade is delivering AI-powered insights with ai.RETAIL, a data insight solution integrated with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Teams for frontline workers. EY has launched a retail solution that builds on Microsoft Cloud for Retail to deliver an improved customer journey and higher sales. Meanwhile, Wipro is addressing the challenge of winning and keeping customers with a ‘buy anywhere—fulfill anywhere’ solution. With Wipro Endless Aisle, retailers can reduce customer dropout and lost sales, strengthen customer relationships and loyalty, and make the physical store a competitive differentiator in an omnichannel world.

With our global partner ecosystem, we continue to strengthen our industry offerings and offer customers a network of trusted partners who build solutions tailored to their specific industry needs. If you’re a prospective partner, learn how to join our network and boost your business.

Learn more

• Learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Retail and explore the Microsoft Cloud for Retail AppSource Gallery.

• Resilient Retail with Microsoft Cloud for Retail.

• Microsoft Cloud for Retail: Creating resilient retailers with our partners.

• Explore Microsoft Cloud for industries solutions global availability.

¹The Next Great Disruption is Hybrid Work – Are We Ready? 2021 Work Ted Index: Annual Report.

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