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Learn more at the National Retail Federation Big Show

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In addition to solutions powered by Microsoft Cloud for Retail, this vision for the future of retail is spotlighted by new Copilot capabilities for Dynamics 365 applications, including:  

• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, providing retailers with AI-powered experiences to transform daily marketing workflows. 
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, providing AI powered guidance for demand planning, streamlining procurement, and enhancing supply chain visibility. 

NRF attendees can learn more about the transformative power of AI across the retail industry by attending two Big Ideas Sessions hosted by Shelley Bransten, Corporate Vice President, Global Retail, Consumer Goods, and Gaming Industries, and Kathleen Mitford, Corporate Vice President, Global Industry Marketing. 

Helping retailers personalize the shopping experience  

Retailers often tell us that they’re under pressure to get marketing and customer experience projects and campaigns to market faster and are asked to do more with less. Yet, the processes and tools they use haven’t evolved to meet this demand.  

Deploying a project to market requires various roles or specialists, costly third-party agencies, and siloed applications to review data and create content. Monitoring results for optimization also becomes a timely and tedious task, having to track down the right people with the right application and the right data. These challenges not only hinder a campaign’s time to market and employee productivity, but can also result in a disjointed customer experience.

It’s not just our customers who are feeling the burden of these challenges. The market is feeling it too. For instance, 63% of surveyed retailers said they hope they can improve their marketing with AI in the next 18 to 24 months.¹ In the age of AI, shouldn’t it be easier to get your campaigns to market?  

We are announcing new Copilot features in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights that will  transform how marketers manage and maintain projects and campaigns, increasing productivity, efficiency, and speed to market. These new capabilities build on Copilot features introduced in the past year, including, but not limited to, the ability to generate content ideas, query customer data using natural language, and create customer segments and journeys using next-generation AI. 

Marketers can kick-start their marketing project by writing their campaign objective in natural language, or by uploading an existing creative brief. The project board is then generated using the prompt or brief, connected organizational data, and previous campaigns in Customer Insights. The project board streamlines and connects all workflows into one place for building and managing marketing assets. 

“These new copilot capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will enable us to focus our time and energy in the right places—better informing us on optimization priorities without the need to dig into details manually. That alone saves so much time.” —Hannah Harper, Leatherman, Digital Marketing Manager

From the project board, marketers can view the campaign’s target audience and segments, as well as recommendations from Copilot for additional segments that may not have been previously considered. Selecting a suggested audience segment automatically generates a complementary customer journey, saving marketers time while also helping them deliver a personalized customer experience. 

End-to-end customer journeys containing personalized touchpoints, such as promotional emails or event invitations, are generated using Copilot. Through our partnership with Typeface and its enterprise-grade generative AI capabilities, marketers can produce brand-authentic images across assets, supercharging personalized content for greater impact—all from within Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Additionally, Typeface helps align content to the organization’s brand guidelines, including themes, fonts, and product images—extracted from a central asset library.

“Every aspect of the enterprise is already being redefined with generative AI, from developer to product to sales experiences. By combining Dynamics 365 Customer Insights with Typeface’s powerful storytelling engine, we’re fundamentally reshaping campaign workflows with generative AI by starting with just a goal. This means personalizing content at an unprecedented scale, bridging the gap between content and data, and ushering in a new era of marketing creativity and productivity.”—Abhay Parasnis, Founder and CEO of Typeface 

These Copilot capabilities will be available in preview in the first quarter of 2024, with general availability by the third quarter of 2024. Existing Customer Insights customers can sign up now for the early access public preview program here.

This is just the beginning; we will be delivering further content curation, journey testing, and metrics monitoring to optimize campaigns. Our vision is that, together, this new AI-first experience will transform how marketers work by reducing the complexities of end-to-end campaign management and enhancing marketer productivity and ROI.

Learn more about our vision in the video below.

Build a real-time retail supply chain 

In 2024, retail supply chains face countless challenges, from labor shortages and increasing costs to complexities across omnichannel retail experiences. Enterprise AI solutions, now readily available for retailers, can power greater efficiency, productivity, and innovation across the supply chain.  

At Microsoft, we aim to deliver new supply chain innovations powered by Copilot to our customers through our open, flexible, and collaborative Microsoft platform; helping organizations to reduce risk, manage inventory, plan with flexibility, and make quick decisions across the whole supply chain.   

New copilot capabilities to improve demand planning 

A retailer’s success hinges on having the right inventory at the right place at the right time, and that starts with successful demand planning. We recently announced new demand planning capabilities in Dynamics 365 in November 2023 that uses AI, machine learning, and external signals to predict demand accurately, and now we are enhancing it with Copilot. This will help planners understand how a forecast was generated and help them find patterns and anomalies. 

Copilot will also help them make sense of complex relationships across datasets using natural language interactions, and it will also assist with the routine tasks of making demand review reports, saving the planners time to focus on high-priority activities. 

Some of our customers, including Domino’s Pizza UK & Ireland, can use the new demand planning capabilities to make smart predictions from the data and insights.

“The demand planning capabilities in Dynamics 365 are helping us make the right decisions to lower wastage, avoid unnecessary deliveries, and be cybersafe.”—Neha Batra, Head of Business Solutions.  

The new demand planning capabilities create a more flexible, simplified, and intuitive user experience. Planners have an increased level of trust and can rely more on the forecast, knowing how it’s generated. The latest demand planning capabilities help reduce excess inventory and increase working capital for retailers.

New Copilot capabilities to improve productivity and proactively mitigate disruptions  

In November 2023, we also announced new Copilot capabilities in preview for Dynamics 365 that enable supply chain teams to take actions based on insights with conversational help while in the flow of work. This helps increase productivity and improved collaboration among employees across the supply chain and other cross-functional teams to proactively mitigate disruptions and further automate their workflows. See the capabilities in action.  

We also added new Copilot capabilities that will enhance inventory visibility and enable businesses to promise orders with improved accuracy, significantly helping brands elevate their consumers’ buying experience.   

In addition, a new copilot capability that helps to streamline procurement is now generally available. Procurement teams can seamlessly handle the purchase order changes in a scalable and efficient manner and assess the impact of changes downstream to production and distribution before making the right decision.   

Generate product enrichment content for e-commerce sites with Copilot 

Informative, story-rich product content can drive customer engagement and sales on e-commerce sites. Creating that content, however, can be time-consuming and challenging. In October 2023, we launched in preview the ability for business-to-business and business-to-consumer online retailers to use Copilot in Dynamics 365 Commerce to generate enriched product marketing content for their websites. This helps to decrease the time it takes to create compelling marketing content, while increasing productivity and increasing the overall number of online orders.

Visit our Microsoft booth at NRF this year to see these innovations in action.  

Discover the future of retail at NRF 2024 

Learn more about Dynamics 365 solutions for the retail industry and retail solutions introduced at NRF 2024. If you are registered for NRF 2024, we invite you to stop by our booth for demos of our solution and attend the following sessions:  

Retail Unlocked: Achieve more with Microsoft: Hosted by Shelley Bransten, Corporate Vice President, Global Retail, Consumer Goods and Gaming industries, Microsoft  

Sunday, January 14, 2024  | 1:00 – 1:30 PM  Eastern Standard Time (EST)

Join this interactive session to hear about one retailer’s AI journey to date. Hosted by Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, Retail, Consumer Goods & Gaming Industries, Shelley Bransten, you’ll also learn about new AI-focused findings from Futurum Research and all new AI capabilities in Microsoft Cloud for Retail that will help power your AI transformation.    

Unlocking true customer-centricity: optimizing touchpoints across the shopper journey with AI: Hosted by Kathleen Mitford, Corporate Vice President, Global Industry Marketing   

Monday, January 15, 2024  | 11:45 – 12:15 PM  EST

Generative AI and large language models have captured the attention of executives across industries. While the technology’s use cases seem endless, smart retailers and brands must identify and prioritize the applications of generative AI that will be most valuable to their organization and partner with organizations who will treat their data with the highest privacy standards. Join us to hear how Microsoft is helping organizations large and small maximize their generative AI opportunities safely and responsibly.   

Unify your data to unlock AI opportunities: Hosted by Satish Thomas, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Industry Clouds   

Tuesday, January 16, 2024 | 1:00 – 1:45 PM EST

Retailers are swimming in data all day, every day. Even with sophisticated legacy technologies and cutting-edge data science, the majority of that data goes uncollected. Insights stay hidden—often in plain sight. But that’s starting to change. AI tools are enabling retailers to understand their customers, merchandising, supply chains, operations, and workforces better than ever before. Join us to hear about the myriad insights that retailers are drawing from newfound and increasingly precise data sources to run leaner, smarter stores.    

¹ AI Adoption in Retail Survey, The Futurum Group, 2024 https://aka.ms/FuturumAIinRetail

The post Shaping the future of retail with AI and Dynamics 365 appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.

In this post, we take a closer look at how some of our partners are using Microsoft AI services to help customers modernize operations and improve data management across industries. Monetizing AI services is creating new levels of economic opportunity for Microsoft partners in this Era of AI. More than 85 percent of Fortune 100 companies across industries currently use Microsoft Azure AI, and services partners using Microsoft AI and cloud technologies benefit from the breadth and scale of our enterprise-class portfolio. It’s inspiring to see the sheer range of applications where partners are using AI to deliver better customer outcomes—from addressing issues with supply chain visibility and automating processes to improving customer experiences.

Managing data and finding efficiencies with AI
Celebal Technologies, a 2023 Microsoft AI Partner of the Year Award winner has built generative AI-based solution spanning several industries. They have created specific solutions to automate loan processing, manage pharmacy inventory, and enable supply chain visibility.

The company has also created an AI-powered tutor to enhance the learning experience of 400,000 students and educators. Celebal’s solution can handle 100,000 students using it simultaneously and has increased student satisfaction by 80 percent, reduced dropout rates by half, and improved test scores by 30 percent. To achieve this result, Celebal built the solution using Azure OpenAI and Cognitive Services, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure AI Bot Service.

Celebal also has made groundbreaking advancements in its use of GPT, Microsoft OpenAI, and natural language processing. In addition to employing Microsoft Cloud offerings such as Office 365, PowerBI, PowerApps, Dynamics 365, and Azure, the company is using Microsoft Azure’s Machine Learning service to fine-tune and deploy GPT models for various domains and languages.

You can read more about how Microsoft offerings related to AI are helping other enterprises in our AI Transformation Partner Playbook.

Digitizing and automating tedious processes through AI
2023 Microsoft U.S. Partner of the Year for AI, Neudesic has also applied Microsoft Azure AI to its Document Intelligence Platform, which is accelerating work and productivity and creating more personalized experiences for customer management workflows.

Animal Supply Co. was one such client that spent unnecessary time and money with a tedious manual invoicing process that required staff to look up invoices and individually compare them against purchase orders and receipts. Neudesic’s Document Intelligence Platform created productivity and efficiency gains by removing manual document processing from the staff’s workflows and improving vendor relationships. This resulted in $500,000 of annual cost savings and a return on investment within the first year. For another massive record digitization project, Neudesic deployed its platform to automate document scanning, saving an estimated $3 million in labor costs and increasing the customer’s document processing ability to more than a million per year.

Neudesic uses Azure Cognitive Services to automatically extract information from contracts, forms, financial documents, recordings, and images. It also offers an Azure Data and AI Platform Accelerator, which can maximize the value of data with pre-built automation scripts for deploying an Azure data and AI platform, integrating data sources, building data models, and launching collaboration notebooks.

You can read more about how these tools are transforming other work processes with help from AI.

Unlocking data and transforming old systems
Another services partners, Wipro, has helped clients adapt to digital technology and improve their business results. It has been working with customers across multiple industries to drive actionable insights with analytics and AI solutions.

The company’s solutions include using machine learning and reporting to help a medical device manufacturer unlock the value of organizational data for customers and employees. Data and machine learning algorithms are being leveraged to proactively service and maintain manufacturing equipment, ensure the availability of technical service staff, and gather ideas on potential product improvements by leveraging inputs from customer feedback requests and complaints.

A business cafeteria retailer that wanted to optimize prices across its different locations worked with Wipro to create a pricing recommendation engine that uses machine learning. In Australia, a water utility engaged Wipro to transform its legacy systems to comply with regulatory requirements, improve customer service, and become more nimble.

To help these and other clients adopt updated digital technology, Wipro is using Microsoft AI, Azure, and the Microsoft portfolio of data and analytics products, including SQL Server and Power BI. The company’s flagship solutions—Wipro HOLMES, an analytics and AI automation platform, and the Data Discovery Platform—also are built on the Azure platform.

Automating auditing services with AI
Microsoft partner EY is a global leader in digital transformation and intelligent automation, powered by Microsoft AI. They have applied AI technology to enhance and automate their tax and auditing services, making them more efficient and reliable. EY has used Microsoft’s AI tools to automate more than 250 processes worldwide, saving an estimated 2 million hours of human work every year while increasing quality and accuracy.

EY follows three core principles when implementing any automation technology: free up resources, improve decision making, and complement human capabilities rather than replace them. EY has helped various clients across public and private sectors to leverage AI solutions for their business needs, such as developing a national AI strategy for the Government of Malta or leveraging an EY Smart Retail Solution to improve inventory management for a dairy products company.

Enabling partners to create modernized solutions
With Microsoft AI technology, partners are innovating solutions that streamline workflows and processes, improve productivity and efficiency, and build new revenue streams. This is enabling new opportunities for customers looking to address challenges across industries.

Partners with deep knowledge about building and deploying solutions using Microsoft Azure AI are invited to explore the benefits of earning the Build and Modernize AI Apps with Microsoft Azure specialization. Microsoft announced also a three times investment to increase the scale and availability of Azure Migrate and Modernize, along with the launch of Azure Innovate. Discover how Azure Innovate is designed to help at each stage of building AI solutions, from planning to deployment.

Additionally, find out how joining the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program gives our partners advantages as they build AI-powered services. Get a head start on going to market with the Era of AI campaign. This collection of ready-to-go assets and marketing campaign in a box are designed to help you drive demand and communicate customer value.

The post How Microsoft and service partners use AI to enable customer transformation appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog.