What is Microsoft Cloud for Retail?

In response to the industry's focus on cloud services, Microsoft has prioritized the development of services that are specific to the industry. Microsoft Cloud for Retail is a collection of proven tools to connect your customers, your people, and most importantly, your data.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail accelerates business growth by providing trusted retail industry solutions that integrate with retailer’s existing systems. Through this complete set of retail specific capabilities across the Microsoft Cloud portfolio, in addition to partner solutions, it becomes possible to seamlessly connect your customers, your people, and your data.

AI capabilities in Microsoft Cloud for Retail help you increase productivity across various aspects of your business. It helps in building and analyzing your data, creating personalized shopping experiences for your customers, supply chain management, and store operations. Microsoft Cloud for Retail brings together different data sources across the retail value chain and connects experiences throughout the shopper journey using capabilities from Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Fabric.

Priority retail scenarios and capabilities

Microsoft Cloud for Retail is an industry-specific cloud that introduces capabilities for retail customers across the following four key scenarios:

Maximize the value of your data

Retailers are challenged to unify vast and increasing amounts of data across various sources that don't necessarily communicate well with one another. Maximizing the value of your data is about unifying these data sources and increase data-driven productivity with AI driven data insights to realize greater value across your enterprise.

For more information, see Maximize the value of your data.

Elevate the shopping experience

Retail customers demand experiences tailored to their tastes and respect of their time and energy. Tools tailored for this scenario, along with hyper-personalisation using AI, help foster stronger customer relationships, increase online and offline cart size, and drive loyalty.

For more information: Elevate the shopping experience.

Build a real-time, retail supply chain

Currently, supply chain stability and agility are the most pressing frontiers for retail organizations around the world. As a result, Microsoft has core solutions that include AI to provide visibility across your entire supply chain and to predict and manage changes in supply and demand at all points. Retailers can create an agile, resilient retail supply chain by connecting data across your ecosystem to identify issues and optimize performance.​

For more information, see Build a real-time, retail supply chain.

Empower the store associate

Microsoft provides modern work solutions that help in collaboration and automation to manage burnout so that store associates can be as effective and empowered as possible. You can equip your retail workforce with AI based solutions to increase customer satisfaction while reducing the burden on your frontline and empowering your team's growth.

For more information, see Empower the store associate.

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