The single most important factor in delighting the shopper is data – and more specifically, what retailers do with the volumes of data they have at their fingertips.

For example, we’ve come to expect that an online retailer will tell a shopper what people who looked at the same last three items finally ended up buying — a helpful and persuasive bit of information. But today’s intelligent retailers are using data not just for those anticipated recommendations, but also in new and surprising ways in physical environments.

An astute salesperson in a brick-and-mortar store might take note of a what a shopper has left in his online cart and, when that shopper visits the store, have those items – as well as others that are recommended based on his past purchase history – ready for trying on in a dressing room.

This week at the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) annual show in New York City, Microsoft’s emphasis is on data: what data retailers need, and how best to collect and analyze it. Happily, thanks in part to Microsoft Azure, as well as AI and Internet of Things (IoT) cloud services, wrangling data is becoming increasingly easy and inexpensive for retailers of all sizes.

Armed with the right data, brick-and-mortar stores can more easily offer world-class service that seamlessly spans online and in-person, too. Data-driven control over the supply chain can help maintain just the right levels of inventory. Data can help a store quickly stock items that will sell well because of weather or local events. Knowing a customer’s buying and browsing histories enables helpful purchase suggestions and increases opportunities for upselling.

Here are some examples of retailers innovating with Microsoft technology to make creative use of data, thus winning customers’ hearts, minds and dollars. All are on display in Microsoft’s booth at NRF.

Providing new and personalized experiences

Grocery chain Kroger is collaborating with Microsoft and others to create EDGE (Enhanced Display for Grocery Environment), a grocery-store shelf with a tall vertical front surface that’s a video screen displaying prices, nutritional and allergy information, videos, or other images or data that might boost sales. EDGE relies on Azure to store and process volumes of data.

Connected to both store management and customers by Zigbee, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, EDGE monitors quantities to ensure stock doesn’t run low. Prices can be set systemically and changed quickly for flash promotions. EDGE can even be programmed to offer sale prices to customers as they pass by, if they’ve indicated they’re interested in a given product and have downloaded an associated app. Now being tested in about 20 Kroger stores, EDGE is set for wider roll-out in 2018.

Ensuring an agile supply chain and empowering employees with omnichannel insight

What’s warm, fuzzy and backed by hidden Microsoft technology? A custom-made stuffed deer, bear, monkey or rabbit from Build-A-Bear Workshop.

Until recently, the global company was using siloed systems that required IT efforts to provide company-wide views of key metrics. Now Dynamics 365 is helping the company build a sturdy, unified IT foundation that will allow for future innovation.

For example, moving forward – and with the customer relationship management capabilities of Dynamics 365 as the foundation – Build-A-Bear is looking to empower its store employees with Microsoft 365, which will provide them with easier access to training, sales metrics and information to assist in offering the best customer experience possible. All of this will help them focus on doing what Build-A-Bear does best: making kids (and their parents) happy.

Home-improvement company Lowe’s worked with Silicon Valley-based Fellow Robots to deploy LoweBots, five-foot-tall autonomous robots powered by Microsoft Azure that scan shelf inventory and assist store personnel with inventory data, metrics and shelf intelligence.

Microsoft’s Azure cloud services come into play when processing the large amounts of data that a LoweBot generates while it scans inventory on the shelves. The bot takes high-resolution images and identifies which items are out of stock, misplaced or mislabeled. By keeping constant tabs on inventory, the robot frees store employees to assist customers, and empowers corporate employees to make better and faster decisions when it comes to inventory.

Currently LoweBots are deployed in Lowe’s and BevMo Bay Area stores, but in wider use, its inventorying skills could cut into the $70 billion that U.S. businesses spend each year on inventory management tasks.

Empowering employees with technology

Retail giant Macy’s relies on its Macy’s Technology team to provide in-store systems, e-commerce sites, mobile apps and internal tools that foster innovation and employee engagement to attract top talent and boost productivity. Macy’s uses insights from Microsoft Workplace Analytics and MyAnalytics to help build a culture that focuses on how employees choose to spend their time.

This improved understanding of workplace behaviors allows managers and employees to  free up time for creativity and innovation with practices like blocking out focus time and optimizing time in meetings.

Innovating to re-imagine the shopping experience

In a major innovation, software developer Xenia Retail has teamed with electronics giant Philips on a showroom/warehouse-model shopping experience designed to eliminate shopping carts and speed check-out, while allowing retailers to re-imagine what their physical footprint looks like for customers.

Rather than removing an item from the shelf and putting it into the cart, the shopper signals intent to buy by holding his phone up to a product to unveil digital value – such as crowd-sourced reviews and complimentary products – and select the quantity, color or size desired. Check-out is virtually instantaneous and can be completed in the app or via self-checkout on a secure payment terminal.

As carts are built and transacted in the digital realm, orders are picked and packed in real-time by team members in the back warehouse, and fulfilled according to the shopper’s preference. In doing so, retailers can optimize and reduce front-of-house operations to better focus on warehousing and online fulfillments as ecommerce continues to grow.

Xenia is based on Windows and runs on Azure. The company is integrating Power BI, Dynamics 365 and Outlook into its offerings.

To see and interact with these innovations, visit the Microsoft booth (#2803) at the NRF Big Show, and plan to attend our session to hear first-hand from these and other customers who are transforming their customer experiences, operations, employee engagement and products with intelligent technologies.

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The winners were selected from more than 130 submissions from campaigns and projects around the world. Our feature about Haiyan Zhang, a Microsoft researcher who built a prototype watch that can short-circuit the tremors caused by Parkinson’s Disease, also won Best Article.

Visit PR Daily to read the award announcement.

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“This year, perhaps more than any other, I have earned my road warrior stripes,” he wrote. “My travels have taken me to the Middle East, Africa, North and South America, Asia and Europe. In truth, I love this aspect of my job, as it gives me plenty of face-to-face opportunities with customers.

“I usually come away from these meetings with a sense of awe, due in equal measure to the technology that makes digital transformation possible (“talking shop” with customers is a guilty pleasure of mine) and how digital is reshaping business models across every industry.”

Read his full post on LinkedIn to learn how Maersk, The Yield, MARS, Schneider Electric and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America embraced digital transformation.

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 In a world full of digital natives, online shopping has become the norm, and retailers must adapt and evolve if they wish to remain competitive, especially with the growing influence of millennials.

And yet, while 80 percent of business leaders believe that their industry will be disrupted by technology, most don’t have a transformation plan in place.

At an event hosted at its Milan-based headquarters, Microsoft brought together media, influencers and retail experts from around the world to discuss the future and trends of the retail industry, and the role that technology can play in it, showcasing how the power of technological transformation can help retail business evolve, thrive and grow.

Read the full story at Microsoft News Centre Europe, and visit the Future of Retail hub for more stories of digital transformation.

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But an infrastructure gap is keeping this broad vision from becoming a reality. Digital transformation is happening faster than we expected — only in pockets. Microsoft and its partners seek to help city and other public infrastructures close the gaps, with advanced technologies in the cloud, data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).

Microsoft’s goal is to be a trusted partner to both public and private organizations in building connected societies. This summer, an IDC survey named Microsoft the top company for trust and customer satisfaction in enabling smart-city digital transformations.

Last week at a luncheon in New York City, Microsoft and executives from three organizations participating in the digital transformation shared how they are helping to close the infrastructure gap.

TomTom NV, based in Amsterdam, traditionally focused on providing consumers with personal navigation. Now, “the need for locations surpasses the need for navigation — it’s everywhere,” said Arnold Meijer, strategic business development manager. “Managing a fleet of connected devices or ordering a ride from your phone — these things weren’t possible five years ago. We’re turning to cloud connectivity and the Internet of Things as tools to keep our maps and locations up to date.”

Sensors from devices and vehicles on the road deliver condition and usage data essential to highway planners, infrastructure managers and fleet operators to make well informed decisions.

Autonomous driving is directly in TomTom’s sights, a way to cut down on traffic accidents, one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide, and to reduce emissions through efficient routing. “You probably won’t own a vehicle 20 years from now, and the one that picks you up won’t have a driver,” Meijer said. “If you do go out driving yourself, it will be for fun.”

With all that time freed up from driving, travelers can do something else such as relax or work. Either option presents new business opportunities for companies that offer entertainment or enable productivity for a mobile client, who is almost certainly connected to the internet. “There will be new companies coming out supporting that, and I definitely foresee Microsoft and other businesses active there,” Meijer said.

“Such greatly eased personal transport may decrease the need to live close to work or school, changing settlement patterns and reduce the societal impacts of mobility. All because we can use location- and cloud technology.” he added.

The New York City Dept. of Education is using Microsoft technology extensively in a five-year, $25-million project that will tell parents their children’s whereabouts while the students are in transit, increase use of the cafeterias and provide access to information about school sports.

The city’s Office of Pupil Transportation provides rides to more than 600,000 students per day, with more than 9,000 buses and vehicles. For a preliminary version of the student-tracking system, the city has equipped its leased buses with GPS devices.

“When the driver turns on the GPS and signs in his bus, we can find out where it is at any time,” said George Pitagorsky, executive director and CIO for the department’s Office of School Support Services. If parents know what bus their child is on, they can more easily meet it at the stop or be sure to be there when the child is brought home.

A next step will be GPS units that don’t require driver activation. To let the system track not just the vehicle but its individual occupants, drivers will still need to register students into the GPS when they get on the bus.

“Biometrics like facial recognition that automate check-in when a student steps onto a bus — we’re most likely going to be there, but we’re not there yet,” Pitagorsky said.

Further out within the $25-million Illumination Program, a new bus-routing tool will replace systems developed more than 20 years ago, allowing the creation of more efficient routes, making course corrections to avoid problems, easily gathering vehicle-maintenance costs and identifying problem vehicles.

Other current projects include a smartphone app to advise students of upcoming meal choices in the school cafeterias, with an eye to increasing cafeteria use, enhancing students’ nutritional intake and offering students a voice in entree choices. The department has also created an app that displays all high school sports games, locations and scores.

A new customer-relations management app will let parents update their addresses and request special transport services on behalf of their children, with no more need to make a special visit to the school to do so. A mobile app will allow parents and authorized others to locate their children or bus, replacing the need for a phone call to the customer service unit. And business intelligence and data warehousing will get a uniform architecture, to replace the patchwork data, systems and tools now in place.

Fathym, a startup in Boulder, Colorado, is directly addressing infrastructure gaps through a rapid-innovation platform intended to harmonize disparate data and apps and facilitate Internet of Things solutions.

“Too often, cities don’t have a plan worked out and are pouring millions of dollars into one solution, which is difficult to adjust to evolving needs and often leads to inaccessible, siloed data,” said co-founder and chief marketing officer Christy Szoke. “Our philosophy is to begin with a small proof of concept, then use our platform to build out a solution that is flexible to change and allows data to be accessible from multiple apps and user types.” Fathym makes extensive use of Azure services but hides that complexity from customers, she said.

To create its WeatherCloud service, Fathym combined data from roadside weather stations and sensors with available weather models to create a road weather forecast especially for drivers and maintenance providers, predicting conditions they’ll find precisely along their route.

“We’re working with at least eight data sets, all completely different in format, time intervals and spatial resolutions,” said Fathym co-founder and CEO Matt Smith. “This is hard stuff. You can’t have simplicity on the front end without a complicated back-end system, a lot of math, and a knowledgeable group of different types of engineers helping to make sense of it all.”

Despite the ease that cloud services have brought to application development, even 20 years from now foresees a need for experts to wrangle data.

“When people say, ‘the Internet of Things is here’ and ‘the robots are going to take over,’ I don’t think they have the respect they should have for how challenging it will remain to build complex apps,” Smith said.

Added Szoke, “You can’t just say ‘put an AI on it’ or ‘apply machine learning’ and expect to get useful data. You will still need creative minds, and data scientists, to understand what you’re looking at, and that will continue to be an essential industry.”

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“It’s important that Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus has a positive impact on the local community and surrounding environment,” says Brad Smith, Microsoft president and chief legal officer. “That’s why we’ve designed the space with one particular resource in mind: water. We’ve also designed the grounds in a way that will revitalize and support the neighboring Stevens Creek waterway and ecosystem.”

You can explore the new campus and learn more in A Watershed Moment, a digital storybook on Microsoft Story Labs.

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But while the breakthrough insights IoT solutions can provide are significant, they can be even more powerful when combined with location-based insights. At AutoMobility LA on Tuesday, Microsoft announced the public preview of Azure Location Based Services, a new Azure cloud offering to power the “Location of Things.”

“This includes geographical data that can better connect smart cities, infrastructure, Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, and empower industrial transformation, from manufacturing to retail to automotive – and everything in between,” writes Sam George, director of Microsoft Azure IoT, in a post on the Official Microsoft Blog.

Available in early December, Azure Location Based Services will provide an enterprise-ready location service for customers to build mobility, asset tracking and other geospatial applications that provide useful insights through one dashboard, one subscription and one bill.

To learn more, read Sam George’s post on the Official Microsoft Blog.

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Announced Monday, the multi-year partnership establishes Microsoft Azure as Chevron’s primary cloud and is part of Chevron’s efforts to digitize its oil fields and accelerate deployment of new technologies that can increase revenues, reduce costs and improve the safety and reliability of operations.

“Chevron has a long history of applying technology,” said Bill Braun, chief information officer of Chevron. “This partnership will allow us to digitally transform and leverage the scale and capabilities of Microsoft to ensure we harness the value of our data.”

The partnership also includes technical collaboration, joint innovation and employee cross-training. It will help Microsoft develop products that solve Chevron’s business challenges and Chevron to transform the growing amount of data it generates into performance-driving intelligence.

“Chevron is a very sophisticated consumer of data, compute and IoT,” said Tom Keane, head of global infrastructure for Microsoft Azure. “While they’re excellent today at high-performance computing, the intent of this partnership is, ‘How can we bring that together with Microsoft Azure and more efficiently do oil exploration? Or more efficiently do sensor management from an offshore oil rig?’”

Braun said Microsoft Azure is a good match because of its large global infrastructure, which has more regions than any other cloud provider. He said Azure will enable new solutions in such data-intensive areas as exploration, midstream logistics, retail operations and the management of thousands of oil wells around the world.

“We have an incredible amount of data from our production facilities, drill ships and fiber optic cables inside well casings,” he said. The cables measure pressure, temperature and other metrics and can generate up to 1 terabyte of data a day.

In Houston, engineers monitor data from drill sensors six miles beneath the earth’s surface and across four continents – data that arrives in five to 10 seconds to help ensure human safety and systems controls. In Kazakhstan, Chevron’s new facility expansion can generate more data than all the data produced by the company’s refineries in North America.

“What are we going to do with that data? How do we harness it?” Braun said. “Azure is going to be very helpful in getting real-time data, handling the volume and giving us the ability to scale and apply analytics.”

He envisions a day when Azure, which can quickly ingest and analyze millions of data points, might enable machine learning to read seismic surveys faster and more consistently than humans, similar to the progress being made in reading medical images. And he said predictive maintenance will create smarter workflows with equipment.

Chevron and Microsoft have worked together for years, and Braun said the ability of engineers to learn from one another is critical. He said Microsoft “gets” the enterprise and that Chevron values Microsoft’s technology, technical leadership and partnership mindset. Microsoft gains insight into the oil and gas industry and learns how its solutions work in a company with a global footprint and harsh operating conditions. Microsoft has already improved its high-performance computing infrastructure based on Chevron’s feedback.

“It’s a two-way development program; both sides bring something and get something,” Braun said. “For us to evolve our technology skills at the pace the cloud is moving is very valuable. This partnership helps Chevron stay technically competitive.”

To learn more about Chevron’s partnership with Microsoft, read the press release.

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In a short time, the bank has made tremendous progress. While TD continues to make the necessary investments in its digital transformation, it does so with the customer at the center. TD has always delivered spectacular in-person customer experiences – that’s how it became the sixth largest bank in North America.

Phrases like artificial intelligence, big data and cloud services didn’t exist in the industry several years ago, but now they’re part of everyday discussions across TD. The bank’s digital and data-driven transformation allows more meaningful and personal engagements with customers, fuels application development, and informs branch and store service delivery by gathering insights to better serve customers the way they want to be served, with precision and close attention to their specific needs.

TD generates close to 100 million digital records daily, and has more than 12 million digitally active customers. With the Microsoft Cloud to help harness that data, TD can deliver on their promise of legendary service at every touchpoint.

“After all, we’re talking about people’s money,” says Imran Khan, vice president of Digital Customer Experience at TD. “No one gets up in the morning and says, ‘I want a mortgage or a new credit card.’ They say, ‘I want to own a home, invest in my children’s education, start a business, take a holiday with my family, plan for a happy and secure retirement.”

TD knew early on that to innovate quickly it required a flexible platform that harnessed customer data and delivered actionable insights. With Microsoft Azure and data platform services to help provide the power and intelligent capabilities TD was in search of, the financial institution continues to live up to its rich reputation.

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An international medical charity that provides health care to the poor and vulnerable, Partners in Health (PIH) recognizes the vital role immediate and reliable communication plays in their mission. They’re also aware that the marriage of 21st-century health care with 21st-century technology could exponentially increase the quality and quantity of the services they provide to underserved communities around the globe. But achieving that union was a journey.

In our interview with chief medical officer Dr. Joia Mukherjee, she explains how PIH progressed from simply recognizing how technology could empower their work to transforming into the international health care force they are today. Watch the interview at microsoft.com.

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