How Microsoft is Driving Retail Innovation with AI and Azure at Shoptalk Fall 2024

Hello everyone.

Welcome back.

This is Omni Talk Retail.

I'm Ann Mazenga.

And I'm Chris Walton.

And we are coming to you live from the floor at shop Talk fall 2024.

And standing between Chris and I is a wonderful partner of ours who's helping make all of our content possible.

From Microsoft, we have Margaret Seinen.

And before we introduce you, Margaret, I just want to give a quick shout out to Microsoft and in thanks for their partnership on this.

Microsoft's mission is to empower every person and every organization to achieve more.

You can learn more about how together tech and people can realize the promise of AI responsibly at Aka Ms.

Alat, Microsoft and Narvar.

Narvar is the leader in post purchase intelligence.

Narvar empowers retailers to drive revenue, reduce costs and streamline operations, all while delivering exceptional customer experiences.

You can stop by and see Narvar right here, right down below at booth L 45 or visit themarvar.com dot.

Now let's get to the most important thing.

Margaret Seinen, Azure sales director at Microsoft for retail and consumer goods.

Welcome to Omnitalk.

Thank you, Anne.

And thank you Chris, for having me.

Thank you.

Yeah, no, it's great to have you.

It's day two of shop talk fall.

That's what conference we're at.

Tell us a little bit about your area of expertise and your role at Microsoft, if you don't mind.

Get us started.

Yeah, so Microsoft has a us subsidiary and within that we have a group of customers that fall within the retail and consumer goods organization.

And so I actually work within that division.

So there's approximately over 300 customers in the enterprise that we actually look after.

Wow.

I and my team specifically, we focus on the Azure platform.

And what I would say is that we actually help customers solve problems and do the best that they can in terms of getting the value out of that platform that they've invested in.

And for the average maybe merchant or, or maybe design person in retail that might be watching this too.

What is the Azure platform, if you don't mind, for the neoplight in technology?

It's like a personal data center on steroids.

That's what I would say.

So it just allows you to develop applications or leverage pre designed, pre configured applications and you can manage the application yourself or Microsoft can manage it for you and you can just deploy the infrastructure services if you want to.

So it's very customized is what I would say.

Yeah, right.

Margaret, what's the key message that you and the Microsoft Team are kind of trying to get across to people you're talking with, you're meeting with, you're seeing on stage here at shop talk fall.

The spectrum is so wide here.

This is because not only Azure do we sell, but we've also got productivity suite, we've also got CRM and enterprise resource planning solutions as well.

So the conversations have been quite broad.

But what I would say is most of the customers here are wanting to understand what the customer journey is and how we can actually improve it with our technology.

They're also wanting to make sure that we can help them and support them with personalization.

And they're also wanting to enhance the customer experience that our store associates have as well.

Oh, okay, cool.

And then also linking data with supply chain.

And this is all underpinned in the new world of Genai.

And so every conversation we have is essentially customized and we're meeting the customer where they are.

That's really great.

So data for supply chain, improving the store associates experience, and then of course marketing personalization too.

That's a really good trifecta.

That's very well summarized.

Nice job.

I might borrow that in our recap tomorrow actually, because that was really well said.

I love it.

All right, so one of the themes is also unified or omnichannel commerce.

How are you thinking about that in your role at Microsoft as well?

So when I look at unified commerce, I think it's three components that you need to focus on.

So first is the user experience, the second is operations, and then the third is the technology that underpins all of that.

And what I would say is we've got many, many examples where we're actually leveraging Genai, but we're also looking at ways that we can automate processes.

We're looking at ways that we can improve processes and making sure that we increase their top line, but also improve their bottom line as well.

And what's ahead this year?

Like, we've talked about quite a few things, especially how you're thinking at Microsoft about this idea of unified commerce.

But what are you, what announcements are there coming up or what's ahead for holiday that you really think retailers and brands need to be paying attention to?

There's a massive event that Microsoft's having in Chicago in November.

It's Kord ignite.

And I'm actually embargoed at the moment to share anything that's going to be announced.

Is the time.

It is the time.

So that's end of November.

End of November.

You gotta go to ignite.

Well, you can join remotely all the tickets have been sold out.

Oh, wow.

All right.

Okay.

I can only imagine, Margaret, I can only imagine what wonderful things will be announced at that meeting.

What I would say is, with AI, we've been doing a lot of proof of concepts in the last twelve months since we sort of started to embed a lot of that AI technology in our productivity suite.

But what we're doing now is we're seeing a lot of customers that have a lot of in house talented.

They're actually moving beyond the proof of concept now and we're actually deploying a lot of solutions.

And I can go through some of those.

Yeah, let's hear it.

And I'll do that in a moment.

But what this is all being underpinned with is responsible AI and security.

And so that is paramount to anything that we do at the moment.

And I can go through the six responsible AI components that we focus on, if I can remember that.

It's all right, we got time.

You tell us to.

I'll probably give four examples.

So there's a large pharmaceutical company, or not pharmaceutical retailer, where we've actually helped provide a virtual assistant.

So what it enables you to do is ask a very prompted question.

So I'm a male, I have really large pores.

I'm wanting to look for a particular product that will not make my pores look so large.

So what we're able to do is actually customize a search engine so that you can come up with not only products that are available on the shelf, but the store that it's located and available in, whether you want it delivered in person, or it can go with your demographics as well, but also actually looking at prescription content and making it far more understandable about if you were to go to a medical practitioner in terms of what you could actually request to manage that beauty problem that you may have as a male consumer, if.

You have large pores.

Exactly.

Hopefully she's not talking about me, folks, but.

All right, let's get you out of here on this.

So I heard a statistic yesterday, shared some research, was done by a gentleman, Holden Bale, and he said that 50% of retailers still are not feeling like they are capitalizing on generative AI in any substantive way.

Do you agree with that?

Or, and if so, like, what is holding it back?

It's definitely the legalities and the privacy and the security.

So what we're finding is that for us to do anything a proof of concept, we have to go through the legal bodies of a customer and making sure that privacy and personalization is all adhered to, and all the HIPAA and the requirements, particularly in the pharmaceutical area, needs to be adhered to as well.

So that's so a big roadblock.

People are trying to cross their t's and dot their I's before they move forward.

But we expect that to probably change here in the future, too.

Right.

I, they'll feel like they're substantially making an impact inside their organizations here at some time horizon.

What do you predict that will be?

Do you have any idea when that number will shift?

Well, what I'm finding is if there is a lot of in house talent or there's a great partner solution that is adherent and complies to everything, I'm finding that the progress is actually advancing at the moment as well.

It's advancing pretty quick.

Just depends on the organization.

It benefits everybody to get that figured out as soon as possible.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, that wraps us up.

That wraps us up.

Thank you to Margaret Signan of Microsoft for being with us today.

Thank you to Microsoft and Narva for sponsoring our coverage here at shop talk fall.

You can see the exhibit hall behind us.

It's bustling.

And until next time, Ann, be careful out there.