NRF's Big Show 2024: Microsoft urges retailers to look for high-impact AI scenarios

Microsoft will launch two new Copilot templates and a new Fabric solution for retailers that will aim to encourage them to explore industry-specific scenarios with the company’s AI and new data unification tools.

“It has been a year of two halves,” Microsoft CVP Shelley Bransten told an audience at the NRF 2024 Big Show. In the first half of 2023, retailers began to see the possibilities of generative AI, she said. But by the second half of the year Microsoft observed that customers in the retail space were already winnowing down hundreds of potential use cases to just a handful of the most promising opportunities.

Now that retailers are focusing more on how to bring AI into their toolboxes, Bransten believes the industry is “normalizing on a few high-impact use cases” in areas like personalization, e-commerce experiences, and supply chain intelligence. Microsoft will provide AI services for both natural language-based generative use cases and for use cases that require a “reasoning engine” to work over an organization’s data providing new ways to answer questions.