Plan and prepare for Microsoft Cloud for Retail in 2023 release wave 1

Overview

Microsoft Cloud for Retail help retailers maximize their data's value, provide a delightful and engaging shopping experience for their shoppers, and empower store associates to be productive and customer-savvy. These capabilities also enable retailers to build an optimized, real-time, and sustainable supply chain. Microsoft Cloud for Retail is supported with retail industry-specific data models, APIs, and an ecosystem of partners to build retail-specific scenarios.

International availability of Microsoft Cloud for Retail can be explored through the Industry Cloud availability report.

Updates to Microsoft Cloud for Retail 2023 release wave 1

Investment areas

Retail workforce management
Retail workforce management aims to provide data-driven experiences to store employees and help increase store efficiency. The features under this workstream come together to enable store associates and managers to manage activities better, improve store compliance to HQ-suggested standards, and create a delightful shopping experience for the customers.

For instance, AI-enabled product recommendations would help sales assistants make product recommendations to customers, providing an opportunity to cross-sell and upsell. A mobile experience for the store manager would enable them to keep a tab on store operations while on the move, among other things. This release wave will introduce capabilities that would help improve store efficiency by providing insights to employees in their flow of work.

Intelligent stores
Brick-and-mortar retailers are under threat by the explosion of e-commerce worldwide. Two significant areas where brick-and-mortar retail has traditionally lagged behind online rivals are (a) the overall shopping experience since shopping online is more convenient with no need to drive or wait in long lines and (b) using store analytics intelligence on shopping data to drive greater commerce. Microsoft Cloud for Retail will help brick-and-mortar retailers bridge these gaps with solutions that will make their stores more intelligent across the two broad areas of store experience and store analytics.

Microsoft will partner with a leading automated store provider to provide a frictionless shopping experience for shoppers in-store. Microsoft Connected Spaces, a 1P Intelligent Store, will provide the analytical backbone for the product. Store analytics will allow brick-and-mortar retailers to unlock insights from their data exhaust – use shopper behavior and transactional data to track store KPIs, generate analytics and data-science-driven findings to optimize product selection, shelf placement, store layout, marketing campaigns, and more. Thereby continuously improving the in-store shopping experience.

To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Microsoft Cloud for Retail below:

For application administrators

User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.

Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.