154 VIEWPOINT Shish Shridhar is global retail startups lead at Microsoft From process automation to enterprise-wide intelligence “Retailers and consumer goods organisations are moving beyond dashboards and visualisation tools” Over the last two decades, retailers and consumer goods companies have invested heavily in cloud platforms, connected commerce, data modernisation, automation and enterprise applications. These investments improved visibility, efficiency and coordination across the business, but decision-making remained largely human-driven and workflow execution continued to be fragmented across organisational boundaries. However, what we are seeing now is fundamentally different. AI is not simply another technology layer; it is moving from being a tool for individual tasks to an operational intelligence layer able to connect decisions, data and actions across the enterprise. As a result, a new operating model – one where businesses can continuously sense, decide and act across the value chain – is emerging. This shift is giving rise to what many describe as an AI-native operating model, whose core elements are connected data foundations, agents embedded within business processes, and clear boundaries for human oversight. People remain accountable for objectives, commercial judgement and exception management, while agents monitor conditions, assemble context, model options and carry out defined actions. Importantly, the operating model learns from outcomes, ensuring future recommendations reflect current operational realities rather than static assumptions. This reflects a broader change taking place across the retail industry. Retailers and consumer goods organisations are moving beyond dashboards and visualisation tools as intelligence becomes embedded directly into operational workflows. Increasingly, value is created inside the workflow rather than alongside it. The highest-impact deployments place AI at the point of execution, equipping planners, operators, associates and decision makers with intelligence where work actually happens. While the technologies may vary, the retailers and consumer goods organisations achieving the greatest impact share a common characteristic: they are redesigning workflows around intelligence rather than simply layering AI onto existing processes. They recognise that competitive advantage increasingly comes not from having more AI tools, but from connecting intelligence, decision-making and execution into a continuous system. As a result, across the Microsoft for Startups portfolio and the wider retail technology ecosystem, I’m seeing a new class of organisation emerge: frontier firms, characterised by five distinct capabilities. First is unified intelligence. Leading retailers require a shared understanding of what is happening across stores, suppliers, distribution centres, factories and customers. AI is transforming retail as businesses move beyond pilots and dashboards towards operating models where intelligence, decision-making and execution form a continuous system
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQ1NTk=