Retailers must increasingly integrate cloud and edge computing architectures to deliver store-based innovations. The good news? The industry long ago embraced technology as critical to its future, and the pandemic accelerated innovation across the industry.
“What I’m seeing that’s really different is the speed and pace of the deployment of digital tools,” said Shelley Bransten, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of global retail and consumer goods. “We’re seeing a lot of our retail customers acting in some ways like tech companies do, in terms of adopting technology, putting it into market and being more nimble.”
Bransten said Microsoft’s Azure Cloud for Retail, which becomes generally available Feb. 1, will allow companies to manage their data more effectively and holistically, breaking down data silos.
3. AI Will Be Retail’s Most Important Asset in 2022
As Bransten noted, retailers have long been awash in data; the challenge has always been data management and analysis. What is the best way to unify data coming from different sources so that back-end systems talk to one another and detailed profiles of customers, who interact with retailers in multiple ways, can emerge?
Karl Haller, partner at IBM’s Consumer Center of Competency, recalled in an interview shopping in a major retailer’s flagship New York store and noticing that images were failing to load on digital signage while a clipboard-quipped employee counted inventory by hand.
Those are both examples of the same problem, he says: “There are individual systems that do not connect effectively to the middle and back-end system where the data resides.”
Artificial intelligence is a key solution likely to help retailers unify and connect their data more effectively while going a long way toward solving a raft of other challenges, from staffing shortages to the challenge of effectively setting prices amid high inflation and managing supply chains.